Translation in Russian Contexts: Culture, Politics, Identity 1138235121, 9781138235120

Table of contents :
Cover
Title
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Double Context of Translation
Part I Pre-Soviet Contexts
1 Translation Strategies in Medieval Hagiography: Observations on the Slavic Reception of the Byzantine Vita of Saint Onuphrius
2 Metatext Verbalization in Early and Modern Russian Translations
3 “The Mother of All the Sciences and Arts”: Academic Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Russia as Cultural Transfer
4 Translation as Appropriation: The Russian Operatic Repertoire in the Eighteenth Century
5 Eighteenth-Century Russian Women Translators in the History of Russian Women’s Writing
6 Expressing the Other, Translating the Self: Ivan Kozlov’s Translation Genres
7 Charles Dickens in Nineteenth-Century Russia: Literary Reputation and Transformations of Style
8 Translation as Experiment: Ivan Aksenov’s Pan Tadeusz (1916)
Part II Soviet Contexts
9 Translation and Transnationalism: Non-European Writers and Soviet Power in the1920s and 1930s
10 Hemingway’s Transformations in Soviet Russia: On the Translation of For Whom the Bell Tolls by Natalia Volzhina and Evgenia Kalashnikova
11 Soviet Folklore as Translation Project: The Case of Tvorchestvo Narodov SSSR, 1937
12 Western Monsters—Soviet Pets?: Translation and Transculturalism in Soviet Children’s Literature
13 “The Good Are Always the Merry”: British Children’s Literature in Soviet Russia
14 “The Tenth Muse”: Reconceptualizing Poetry Translation in the Soviet Era
15 Translating the Other, Confronting the Self: Soviet Poet Boris Slutskii’s Translations of Bertolt Brecht
Part III Late-Soviet and Post-Soviet Contexts
16 (Re)Translation, Ideology, and Business: The Fate of Translated Adventure Fiction in Russia, Before and After 1991
17 “Adieu, Remember Me”: The Hamlet Canon in Post-Soviet Russia
18 Poetic Translation and the Canon: The Case of the Russian Auden
19 Literary Translation, Queer Discourses, and Cultural Transformation: Mogutin Translating/Translating Mogutin
20 Battling around the Exception: A Stateless “Russian” Writer and His Translation in Today’s Estonia
Notes on Contributors
Index

Citation preview

Translation in Russian Contexts

This volume represents the first large-scale effort to address topics of translation in Russian contexts across the disciplinary boundaries of Slavic studies and translation studies, thus opening up new perspectives for both fields. The volume brings together leading scholars from Russia and abroad to offer a comprehensive overview of Russian translation history from the medieval period to today, made possible in many cases by the opening of archives following the fall of the Soviet Union. An empire built on “external” as well as “internal” colonization, Russia has always been a site of multi-layered transcultural and translingual mediations, often accompanied by sophisticated theoretical reflection. Yet within the overall broadening of geographical perspectives that has been a prominent feature of translation studies over the last decade, Russia has been largely neglected. This geographical blind spot within translation studies has its counterpart in a theoretical blind spot within the field of Slavic studies in the West: Phenomena related to translation and their significance for cultural production are to date understudied. This volume demonstrates how theoretical perspectives developed within translation studies may help to conceptualize relevant problems in the Russian cultural context while highlighting valuable Russian contributions to the theory and practice of translation. Brian James Baer is Professor of Translation Studies at Kent State University. He is author of Translation and the Making of Modern Russian Literature (2016) and editor of several collected volumes. He is founding editor of the journal Translation and Interpreting Studies and co-editor of the series Literatures, Cultures, Translation. Susanna Witt is Associate Professor in Slavic Languages and Literatures and Senior Lecturer in Russian at the Department of Slavic and Baltic Languages, Finnish, Dutch, and German, Stockholm University, Sweden. She is the author of Creating Creation: Readings of Pasternak’s Doktor Zhivago (2000) and numerous articles on modern Russian literature and topics of Russian translation history.

Routledge Advances in Translation and Interpreting Studies For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com

18 Queer in Translation Edited by B.J. Epstein and Robert Gillett 19 Critical Translation Studies Douglas Robinson 20 Feminist Translation Studies Local and Transnational Perspectives Edited by Olga Castro and Emek Ergun 21 Studying Scientific Metaphor in Translation An Inquiry into Cross-Lingual Translation Practices Mark Shuttleworth 22 Translating Frantz Fanon Across Continents and Languages Edited by Kathryn Batchelor and Sue-Ann Harding 23 Translation and Public Policy Interdisciplinary Perspectives and Case Studies Edited by Gabriel González Núñez and Reine Meylaerts 24 Translationality Essays in the Translational-Medical Humanities Douglas Robinson 25 The Changing Role of the Interpreter Contextualising Norms, Ethics and Quality Standards Edited by Marta Biagini, Michael S. Boyd and Claudia Monacelli 26 Translation in Russian Contexts Culture, Politics, Identity Edited by Brian James Baer and Susanna Witt

Translation in Russian Contexts Culture, Politics, Identity Edited by Brian James Baer and Susanna Witt

First published 2018 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 Taylor & Francis The right of the editors to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Baer, Brian James, editor. | Witt, Susanna, editor. Title: Translation in Russian contexts : culture, politics, identity / edited by Brian James Baer and Susanna Witt. Other titles: Routledge advances in translation studies. Description: New York ; London : Routledge, 2017. | Series: Routledge advances in translation and interpreting studies | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017009380 | ISBN 9781138235120 (hardback : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Literature, Modern—Translations into Russian— History and criticism. | Translating and interpreting—Russia— History. | Translating and interpreting—Soviet Union—History. | Translating and interpreting—Russia (Federation)—History. | Russian literature—Translations—History and criticism. Classification: LCC P306.8.R8 T73 2017 | DDC 418/.040947—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017009380 ISBN: 978-1-138-23512-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-30535-6 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

Acknowledgmentsviii

Introduction: The Double Context of Translation1 BRIAN JAMES BAER AND SUSANNA WITT

PART I

Pre-Soviet Contexts17   1 Translation Strategies in Medieval Hagiography: Observations on the Slavic Reception of the Byzantine Vita of Saint Onuphrius

19

KARINE ÅKERMAN SARKISIAN

  2 Metatext Verbalization in Early and Modern Russian Translations

37

TATIANA PENTKOVSKAYA AND ANASTASIA URZHA

  3 “The Mother of All the Sciences and Arts”: Academic Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Russia as Cultural Transfer

51

KÅRE JOHAN MJØR

  4 Translation as Appropriation: The Russian Operatic Repertoire in the Eighteenth Century

66

ANNA GIUST

  5 Eighteenth-Century Russian Women Translators in the History of Russian Women’s Writing OLGA DEMIDOVA

85

vi  Contents   6 Expressing the Other, Translating the Self: Ivan Kozlov’s Translation Genres

95

YULIA TIKHOMIROVA

  7 Charles Dickens in Nineteenth-Century Russia: Literary Reputation and Transformations of Style

110

MARINA KOSTIONOVA

  8 Translation as Experiment: Ivan Aksenov’s Pan Tadeusz (1916)

125

LARS KLEBERG

PART II

Soviet Contexts137   9 Translation and Transnationalism: Non-European Writers and Soviet Power in the1920s and 1930s

139

KATERINA CLARK

10 Hemingway’s Transformations in Soviet Russia: On the Translation of For Whom the Bell Tolls by Natalia Volzhina and Evgenia Kalashnikova

159

EKATERINA KUZNETSOVA

11 Soviet Folklore as Translation Project: The Case of Tvorchestvo Narodov SSSR, 1937

174

ELENA ZEMSKOVA

12 Western Monsters—Soviet Pets?: Translation and Transculturalism in Soviet Children’s Literature

188

VALERII VIUGIN

13 “The Good Are Always the Merry”: British Children’s Literature in Soviet Russia

205

ALEXANDRA BORISENKO

14 “The Tenth Muse”: Reconceptualizing Poetry Translation in the Soviet Era

220

MARIA KHOTIMSKY

15 Translating the Other, Confronting the Self: Soviet Poet Boris Slutskii’s Translations of Bertolt Brecht KATHARINE HODGSON

240

Contents vii PART III

Late-Soviet and Post-Soviet Contexts255 16 (Re)Translation, Ideology, and Business: The Fate of Translated Adventure Fiction in Russia, Before and After 1991

257

PIET VAN POUCKE

17 “Adieu, Remember Me”: The Hamlet Canon in Post-Soviet Russia

276

ALEKSEI SEMENENKO

18 Poetic Translation and the Canon: The Case of the Russian Auden

292

ELENA OSTROVSKAYA

19 Literary Translation, Queer Discourses, and Cultural Transformation: Mogutin Translating/Translating Mogutin

306

VITALY CHERNETSKY

20 Battling around the Exception: A Stateless “Russian” Writer and His Translation in Today’s Estonia

321

DANIELE MONTICELLI AND ENEKEN LAANES

Notes on Contributors337 Index344

Acknowledgments

The chapters in the current volume were developed from selected contributions to the conference Translation in Russian Contexts: Transcultural, Translingual and Transdisciplinary Points of Departure, held at Uppsala University in June 2014. We would like to thank the Swedish Foundation for Humanities and Social Sciences (Riksbankens Jubileumsfond) and the Swedish Research Council for financial support, as well as Uppsala Centre for Russian and Eurasian for hosting the conference. Thanks are also due to Julie Hansen, co-organizer, and to all its participants.

Introduction The Double Context of Translation Brian James Baer and Susanna Witt

The etymology of the word context, from the Latin contextus, meaning ‘to weave together,’ suggests that context isn’t a simple add-on, something extra, but that it is, as the Oxford Dictionary makes clear, “the circumstances that form the setting of an event, statement, or idea, and in terms of which it can be fully understood and assessed.” A focus on context then challenges the traditional conception of translation as a simple ‘carrying over’ of a text for it also involves the weaving of that text into a different cultural fabric, or “web of signification.” This is a many-tendrilled process, one that is more complex and unpredictable than what is suggested by the concept of the remainder (see Venuti 2002), invoking something more akin to Derrida’s notion of the sheaf: The word sheaf seems to mark more appropriately that the assemblage to be proposed [i.e. différance] has the complex structure of a weaving, an interlacing which permits the different threads and different lines of meaning—or of force—to go off again in different directions, just as it is always ready to tie itself up with others. (qtd. in Globus 1995, 51) So let us begin by conceptualizing the concept of context, which is the organizing principle of this volume.

Contextualizing Context One could read the history of translation studies in the postwar period through the lens of context. Early linguistics-based models of translation, for example, were largely focused on the source text and its context, as evident in their concern with equivalence, fidelity, and accuracy. However, when Gideon Toury declared translations to be “facts of the target culture” in the 1980s, inaugurating the field of Descriptive Translation Studies, the focus was shifted to the role of the receiving or target context in shaping the translation, granting new agency to the translator as a “manipulator” (Lefevere 1992) of the source text and a “subversive

2  Brian James Baer and Susanna Witt scribe” (Levine 1991). This attention to the context of the target culture in the study of translations eventually led in the 1990s to an increasing interest in sociological approaches, which embed translators and translations in specific socio-cultural contexts (see Inghilleri 2005; Wolf and Fukari 2007; and Angelelli 2012). Moving away from the context of the original was an important stage in dismantling the model of translation as mimesis, which inevitably cast translations as pale copies of their originals. These target-oriented approaches liberated discussion of translation from a rhetoric of loss and distortion, allowing scholars to focus on the contributions of the translated texts to the receiving culture. In fact, scholars increasingly acknowledge the fact that, once embedded in a new discursive context, or web of signification, the translated work may in fact gain in translation. As Richard Watts argues in Packaging Post/Coloniality, translation may liberate a text from a narrow and confining original context. “The shifting significations of the translated book [. . .] can therefore also constitute a liberation from the restrictions imposed on it by the literary institution of the original context of publication” (2005, 162; italics added). David Damrosch makes a similar point in What Is World Literature?, where he writes: “As it moves into the sphere of world literature, far from inevitably suffering a loss of authenticity or essence, a work can gain in many ways” (2003, 6). And so Damrosch goes on to argue, “To understand the workings of world literature, we need more a phenomenology than an ontology of the work of art: a literary work manifests differently abroad than it does at home” (2003, 6). The context, then, represents the conditions for that manifestation. Against the backdrop of Descriptive Translation Studies, however, with its focus on the context of reception, there have been consistent and urgent calls not to abandon the context of the source text altogether. During the Cold War period, which saw the popularization of linguistic relativity as represented in the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, giving new importance to cultural context in communication. Later, under the influence of postcolonial studies, scholars began to acknowledge the asymmetries or power differentials between the source and target languages and cultures (Niranjana 1992), which make translation almost always an “unequal exchange” (Casanova 2010). This led to a concern with the violence involved in re-siting texts, uprooting them from their original cultural context. Within that conceptual framework, the desire to preserve something of the original context was conceived as an anti-hegemonic gesture, a caution against the universalization of (typically Western) concepts and theories, on the one hand, and the simple appropriation of foreign ones (often non-Western or minoritarian), on the other. This gave rise to various strategies and approaches, ranging from thick translation (Appiah 1993) and foreignization (Venuti 1995) to untranslatables (Cassin 2004) and untranslatability (Apter 2013). The primary role of

Introduction 3 context is especially evident in Appiah’s definition of thick translation as a “richer contextualization,” or “translation that seeks with its annotations and its accompanying glosses to locate the text in a rich cultural and linguistic context” (1993, 812, 817). (Indeed, Appiah uses some form of the word context 16 times.) For Appiah, such an approach to translation stands at the ethical core of teaching literature, as a thick description of the context of literary production, a translation that draws on and creates that sort of understanding, meets the need to challenge ourselves and our students to go further, to undertake the harder project of a genuinely informed respect for others. (1993, 818) More descriptive studies of translation that take into account the uneven distribution of cultural capital have noted a somewhat different phenomenon—that texts translated from outside the orbit of the developed West or Global North tend to be valued primarily, one might say, for their context. In other words, translations from dominated languages, to use Pascale Casanova’s terminology, are typically valued for their insight into the socio-political context of the source text; crudely put, they are read for their ethnographic value. Consider Susan Harris’s comments on the value of reading translations for the context: Literature, with its crucial insight into world events from a human perspective, provides an incomparable line to culture from within, and is ever more valuable in establishing context and filling the lacunae in news reports. And in our largely monolingual country, where foreign-language fluency is the exception rather than the rule, that link, and that context, are accessible only through translation. (2014, 57; italics added) But reading literary works for the context may in fact be a symptom of the “first-world problem” of “insularity and isolation” rather than, as Harris suggests, a solution to it (Harris 2014, 57), especially when we consider that literature from dominating languages is allowed to transcend its socio-political context to be read for its “universal” aesthetic value. The priority of context drives not only the reading of literary works from dominated languages, but also the selection of works for translation. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, for example, when Russian was a dominated language, Russian literary works translated into English were selected largely for their exotic depictions of Russian life and customs. In other words, works were chosen less for their literary or aesthetic merit, and more for the local color they offered (May 2000, 1205).1 This was also true of the Soviet period, when works, especially

4  Brian James Baer and Susanna Witt of dissident authors, were translated for their (negative) depiction of life under communism, reflected in the tendency of some translators to ignore or downplay aesthetic devices (see Baer 2000, II, 1423–1425). The same could be said of the circulation of ideas—that dominating languages have the right to produce theory while dominated languages are consigned to applying it, a major argument of Dipesh Chakrabarty’s work. In Provincializing Europe, for example, Chakrabarty questions why some texts—typically, Western—get universalized and acquire transcendent status as theory. Naoki Sakai makes a similar point when he questions the oddness of the collocation “Asian theorist”: If not completely oxymoronic, the pairing of theory and Asia may strike many readers as a sort of quirk or defamiliarizing trick. At best, it can have the effect of exposing the presumption often taken for granted in fields dealing with certain aspects of what we understand as Asia: namely, that theory is something we do not normally expect of Asia. (2010, 441) Seeing this right to universalization and abstraction—and its denial—as central to the workings of Western cultural hegemony, Chakrabarty calls on scholars to interrogate it by re-siting the original work—Marxism, in his case—in its specific socio-political context, a process he describes as provincializing: To “provincialize” Europe was precisely to find out how and in what sense European ideas that were universal were also, at one and the same time, drawn from very particular intellectual and historical traditions that could not claim any universal validity. It was to ask a question about how thought was related to place. Can thought transcend places of their origin? Or do places leave their imprint on thought in such a way as to call into question the idea of purely abstract categories? (2007, xiii) In focusing attention on the context of the original as well as the context of the target text, Chakrabarty introduces a necessary correction to exclusively target-centered approaches, which puts his work in line with the transfer-oriented approach of the Göttingen School. As Kurt MuellerVollmer and Michael Irmscher note, Unlike [polysystem theory], which focuses primarily on the translated text within the target literary system, the Göttingen school considered both source language and target language text in their respective environments. This is indeed necessary if one is to study

Introduction 5 the processes of literary and cultural transfer in their specific historical settings. (Mueller-Vollmer and Irmscher 1998, xii) It is precisely the dual context of translated texts, that is, their capacity to connect or juxtapose two contexts, that makes them especially interesting from a cultural studies point of view. Consider Vladimir Nabokov’s controversial translation of Pushkin’s Evgenii Onegin with its “footnotes reaching up like skyscrapers to the top of this or that page so as to leave only the gleam of one textual line between commentary and eternity” (1955, 512). While the exiled writer’s desire to document the original Russian context of this foundational work of Russian literature produced a volume of commentary that dwarfed the translation itself, his use of “skyscrapers” to describe those footnotes acknowledges, perhaps unwittingly, the dual context of translation, connecting early nineteenthcentury Russia with a postwar United States.2 With a foot in two contexts, translated texts therefore represent “less a set of works than a network” (Damrosch 2003, 3), so that “even a single work of world literature is the locus of a negotiation between two different cultures” (283). Olivia E. Sears evokes the generative capacity of this negotiation when she describes her reading of translations of tales from the island of Buru: Like the hunter in the Buru tale, it seemed, this translation took me on an unexpected journey: I had entered a forest cave in Buru and emerged in the labyrinth of a Dada poem, following the threads left behind by the great storytellers of twentieth-century world literature. (Sears 2014, 43) For scholars, it is the ability of translated texts to lay bare these negotiations between foreign and domestic, or global and local contexts that constitute their particular value in any attempt to write a transnational history of a national literary tradition, as this volume aspires to do. And so, the double context of translated texts, once seen through a Romantic nationalist lens as a mark of inauthenticity and contamination, is now seen as providing unique insights into what Goethe called the “traffic in ideas between peoples” (qtd. in Damrosch 2003, 3). That revaluation of translation as a “creative and authentic activity” (Cho 2016, ix), argues Heekyong Cho, is a necessary step in fashioning a methodology for the integration of translation into literary studies that “allows us to better understand literature as a process with inherent intercultural aspects” (182).

Russian Context(s) The dual focus provided by translated texts is especially relevant in the case of Russian literature, as the relationship between Russia and the

6  Brian James Baer and Susanna Witt West has for centuries now been more or less fraught—and mutually defining. As Martin Malia comments, Russia has at different times been demonized or divinized by Western opinion less because of her real role in Europe than because of the fears and frustrations, or the hopes and aspirations, generated within European society by its own domestic problems. (Malia 1999, 8) This was only exacerbated in the Cold War period, when Russia and the United States became adversarial superpowers, each with its own distinct hegemonic claims. The effect of this ideologically charged transnational context was that much of the literature and art produced in that era— as well as the translations—was done with a “sideways glance” at the ideological foe, thoroughly entangling domestic and foreign concerns. The charged political context of the Cold War produced not only statesponsored translations, on the production side, but also a hermeneutics of suspicion, on the reception side, where the meaning of (and in) literary works—as well as other texts—was unavoidably overdetermined on both sides of the iron curtain. Nevertheless, Russian contexts of translation have, until recently, received little attention in Western scholarship, in spite of the overall broadening of geographical perspectives within translation studies that has been challenging the traditionally Eurocentric priorities of the discipline for almost over a decade (Tak-hung Chan 2004; Hermans 2006; Inggs and Meintjes 2009; Wakabayashi and Kothari 2009; Sato-Rossberg and Wakabayashi 2012). This is not to say that Russia is not part of a European context, rather that, as “Europe’s internal other” (Baer 2011), it has been affected by a certain far-sightedness on the part of translation scholars in the European West, while at the same time the rich legacy of indigenous Russian translation scholarship represented by Andrei Fedorov, Mikhail Alekseev, Efim Etkind, and Iurii Levin, to mention but a few, has had its own closed system of circulation and, ironically, for reasons of language has been accessible mainly to Slavists alone. With the pioneering studies of Maurice Friedberg (1977, 1997) and Lauren Leighton (1991) as notable exceptions, it is only during the last decade that the situation has begun to change with the appearance of individual studies as well as collected volumes devoted to translation practice and theory in this part of the world (Baer 2011; Tyulenev 2012; Burnett and Lygo 2013; Menzel and Alekseeva 2013; Baer 2015; Sherry 2015; Ceccherelli, Constantino, and Diddi 2015; and Schippel and Zwischenberger 2017). Bringing together twenty leading scholars from Eastern and Western Europe, the current volume represents the first large-scale effort to address topics of translation in Russian contexts from the earliest periods to the present day across the disciplinary boundaries of Slavic

Introduction 7 Studies and Translation Studies, thus opening up new perspectives for both fields. The book is divided into three parts—“pre-Soviet,” “Soviet,” and “post-Soviet.” The use of the attribute “Soviet” as the organizing principle of the book may at first glance seem controversial, but it is based on the fact that translation in the Soviet Union represents one of the most ambitious state-sponsored programs to promote the translation and dissemination of foreign literature in the history of the world. The attribute “Soviet,” therefore functions to underscore the commonalities across these time periods, as opposed to seeing them as autonomous and unrelated cultural systems, making visible the contours of a tradition stretching across enormous political and cultural upheavals. Part I spans a period of approximately 1000 years during which translation activities were at the heart of large culture-building projects such as the Christianization of Rus’ in the early Middle Ages, the Westernization of the Russian society promoted by Peter the Great (begun already in the mid-seventeenth century), the development of a Russian literary language in the eighteenth century and a modern competitive literature in the nineteenth. While translation was indeed the main semiotic mechanism at work in the transfer of Christian culture from Byzantium to the Eastern Slavs—a process described by the distinguished philologist Dmitrii Likhachev as a “transplantation,” foregrounding the further growth and evolution of the literary monuments transferred (Likhachev 1987, 43)—it is only with some reservations that this early context could be called “Russian” as neither Russia as a state nor Russian as a standardized language was yet in existence. Initially, translation in this context was not merely a transfer of a certain body of texts from the Greek language into an existing target language—the translating language itself (what is now referred to as Old Church Slavonic) was one of the imported entities. Eastern Orthodoxy “arrived in pre-packaged Slavonic translation” (Franklin 2002, 13). This language had originally been created in the ninth century for missionary purposes by the “the apostles of the Slavs,” the Greek brothers Cyril and Methodius, on the basis of South Slavic dialects. When Grand Prince Vladimir, ruler of Kievan Rus’, accepted Christianity for himself and his people in 988, the South and East Slavic dialects were still mutually intelligible. The body of religious texts now introduced (liturgical, hagiographical and homiletic), many of them translated in the already converted regions of Bulgaria and Serbia, could therefore be read and understood without great difficulty in Rus,’ where the vernacular, moreover, was not yet differentiated into the specific languages referred to today as Russian, Belorussian, and Ukrainian. Under Yaroslav the Wise (980–1054), translation was increasingly being carried out locally, and specific Russian norms for Church Slavonic were gradually established. The relationship

8  Brian James Baer and Susanna Witt between this originally imported language and the developing Russian vernacular was functionally defined, leaving the sacred or spiritual sphere (and hence most of the literature) the domain of the former, while the latter was used primarily in administrative, commercial, legal, and everyday writing.3 The modern Russian literary (standard) language that emerged over the course of the eighteenth century was characterized by an integration of elements rooted in these different languages. Two chapters in the volume are dedicated to the earliest period in Russian translation history. Karine Åkerman Sarkisian provides an alternative approach to traditional text-critical research on early Slavic translations. As shown in this chapter, applying theoretical perspectives developed within contemporary translation studies may contribute to a more nuanced picture of the work carried out by medieval translators in the Slavic context, revealing their creative role even during a period when literalist principles were dominant. Tatiana Pentkovskaya and Ansastasia Urzha also explore the agency of medieval translators in their chapter, which focuses on the translation of metatextual operators, discourse markers that express the speaker’s attitude toward the reported information. Challenging traditional disciplinary boundaries, the authors juxtapose the translation of such metatextual elements in early Church Slavonic and modern Russian texts. Following Peter the Great’s policy of forced Westernization in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, translation assumed a central role in transforming every aspect of Russian culture (see Tyulenev 2012 and Coudenys 2016). Kåre Johan Mjør’s chapter documents translation’s role in the establishment of secular philosophy in eighteenth-century Russia, while Anna Giust’s chapter explores the function of translation in the creation of the Russian operatic repertoire. Olga Demidova provides an overview of the opportunities translation offered to women at this time, as a way to participate in the world of letters, establishing a tradition of great woman translators that would continue throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and into today. Translation, primarily from French, played a vital role in the development of the Russian literary language, as demonstrated in the practice (and translational selfreflection) of Mikhail Lomonosov, Vasilii Trediakovskii, and Aleksandr Sumarokov. By the early nineteenth-century translation had become an issue in the quest for a Russian national literature, providing new generic and stylistic forms (Cooper 2011). Vasilii Zhukovskii, a “genius of translation” in the words of Pushkin, came to occupy a central position in the development of a distinctly Russian national literature by introducing samples of European Romanticism. While in the early years of the nineteenth-century translation still served to a large extent as a vehicle for introducing types of literature, genres and aesthetic sensibilities that were lacking in the Russian target system (thus neatly adhering to the model proposed by Even-Zohar 1990),

Introduction 9 over the course of the century, Russian writers showed greater agency in interpreting and adapting foreign forms. Yulia Tikhomirova and Marina Kostionova demonstrate the intricate play between the evolution of original Russian writing and translations in their contributions. Focusing on the context of Russian Romanticism, Tikhomirova analyzes the translation practices of the poet Ivan Kozlov, a disciple and friend of Zhukovskii. While the latter was a mediator of principally German poetic culture, Kozlov introduced British poetry to Russian readers, privileging lyric pieces and fragments of narrative poems. As argued by Tikhomirova, Kozlov’s approach is best described in terms of “translation genres,” embodying the worldview of the translator and affecting the image of the authors being introduced. Kostionova, in her chapter, explores the shifting reputation of Charles Dickens in the Russian context, demonstrating how it was both reflected in and formed by translations. On the basis of successive Russian renditions of The Pickwick Papers, Kostionova sketches the evolution of the writer’s image in Russia from a fashionable entertainer in the 1830s to a revered classic author toward the end of the century. On a general level, the trajectory of Russian literature in the nineteenth century could be described as a transition from the status of a target literature to that of a source literature, catering to the needs of other cultural contexts, as demonstrated by the boom in translations of the “great Russians” into the major European languages in the latter half of the century (May 1994). As shown by Heekyong Cho (2016), in the East Asian context of the turn of the century, Russian literature, here explicitly viewed as “Western,” was the part of “world literature” most eagerly appropriated. This was of course true mainly for prose, the principal literary mode of the Realist period. The epoch of Russian modernism, generally referred to as the “Silver Age” (roughly 1890–1920), was intimately linked with renewed and intensified translational activities, mostly in the field of poetry and drama. Leading Symbolist figures introduced not only their immediate Western inspirations but also representatives of a variety of other traditions. Thus Valerii Briusov, who was also a perceptive critic and theorist of translation (see Baer and Olshanskaya 2013, 67–74) rendered the poetry of kindred spirits such as Paul Verlaine and Émile Verhaeren, as well as samples of Armenian poetry (included in his landmark anthology of 1916). Alongside his translations of European classics from Calderon to Heine and a contemporary such as Wilde, Konstantin Bal’mont introduced Georgian and Japanese literature to Russian prerevolutionary readers. A “longing for world culture” was a prominent feature in the outlook and poetics of the Acmeists, emerging in the early 1910s in opposition to the Symbolists but in this respect actually continuing the cosmopolitan orientation of their predecessors as demonstrated by the translational activities and meta-reflection on translation of the prominent poets Nikolai Gumilev and Osip Mandelstam. During this period of

10  Brian James Baer and Susanna Witt aesthetic experimentation in all spheres of the arts, translation provided yet another field of possibilities, an issue explored in Lars Kleberg’s chapter on the practices of avant-garde poet and translator Ivan Aksenov. From the point of view of literary translation, the Soviet epoch, covered in Part II, did not represent so much a break with the past as an extrapolation of tendencies already at work, albeit in a significantly intensified and centralized form. Notable changes were the increasing instrumentalization of literary imports, a reinstitution of censorship, which had been significantly loosened in the pre-revolutionary years, and, above all, the utopian spirit and aspirations inherent in the grand projects of the time. This period also marked, one could argue, the birth of modern translation studies, with the publication in 1919 of the manual Printsipy khudozhestvennogo perevoda [Principles of literary translation], coauthored by Kornei Chukovskii and Nikolai Gumilev, inaugurating a tradition of sophisticated reflection on the nature and practice of translation (Chukovskii and Gumilev 1919). Launching the publishing enterprise Vsemirnaia literatura [World literature] in 1918, Maksim Gorky declared, Stepping resolutely onto the path of spiritual unification with the peoples of Europe and Asia, the Russian nation in all its mass must know the historical, sociological and psychological characteristics of those nations with which it is now striving towards the construction of new forms of social life. (Baer and Olshanskaya 2013, 66) Literature, he argued, had a “planetary role,” “strongly and profoundly uniting nations from within through a consciousness of a communion with their sufferings and desires, a consciousness of the unity of their strivings toward the improvement of a free and beautiful life” (ibid.). Gorky’s vision represented a “curious crossover between Goethe’s Weltliteratur and the Marxian commodity of universal literature,” at once Romantic and political (Khotimsky 2013, 120). This was a blend that was to inform all subsequent undertakings in the field of literary translation until the end of the Soviet era. Thus, although the Vsemirnaia literatura project was aborted in 1924, having issued about 10% of the originally planned 2800 editions, a similarly large-scale ambition of creating a progressive world literature à la russe (or, more specifically, soviétique) characterized subsequent projects, such as the publishing house Academia in the 1920s and 1930s, the journals Internatsional’naia literatura [International literature, 1933–1944] and Inostrannaia literatura [Foreign literature, 1955–], and, in the late-Soviet period, the Library of World Literature book series (1967–1977).4 Building cultural alliances and enrolling foreign authors for the Soviet cause was a primary concern for the cultural apparatus in the 1930s and 40s, as shown in recent studies by Katerina Clark (2011)

Introduction 11 and Michael David-Fox (2012). In her chapter in the current volume Katerina Clark explores the Soviet-sponsored engagement through translation of non-European writers with socialist realism, revealing the complex and multidirectional processes involved, while Ekaterina Kuznetsova examines the case of the potential Soviet ally Ernest Hemingway and his ill-fated (in the Russian context) novel For whom the Bell Tolls. If the 1920s were marked by the effort to accrue Western cultural capital for the young Soviet state, the 1930s saw translation assuming a vital role in the domestic context as well, serving as a major vehicle for Stalin’s nationalities policies. Within the Soviet empire translation emerged as an important “channel for colonization” (Robinson 1997), disseminating central works of Russian and Soviet literature as well as the classics of Marxism-Leninism and select works of world literature (generally rendered from Russian) into the many languages of the USSR. At the same time, however, translation was being carried out on a massive scale in the opposite direction with the aim of creating a Russophone canon of Soviet literature. Works of the “peoples of the USSR” were an indispensable part of this paradoxical project, which amalgamated national and imperial aspirations in complex and sometimes unpredictable ways. Translation practices themselves became indices of colonialist attitudes as testified by the ubiquitous use of crude Russian intermediates (podstrochniki) in the translation from most of the “languages of the peoples of the USSR” and oftentimes in translation between these languages as well (Witt 2013, 2017). This process is elucidated and problematized in Elena Zemskova’s chapter on the much-vaunted project Tvorchestvo narodov SSSR [Works of the Peoples of the USSR] (an anthology to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the October revolution), pointing out the unstable meaning in this context of concepts such as “original,” “imitation” and “counterfeit.” As for intraUnion translation, its significance as an official ideological project was somewhat overshadowed as priorities during the post-Stalinist Thaw period moved to new source contexts in emerging socialist countries in the Third World, giving visibility to works from Africa, Latin America, and the Far East (Baer 2016). The distinct shift in Soviet culture following the death of Stalin in 1953 affected literary translation to no less a degree than original writing. One of the first signs of the Thaw was the reinstitution, in 1955, of a journal devoted to literary translations, Inostrannaia literatura [Foreign literature], which has retained its status as a relevant publication even in today’s Russia. Changes in the country’s cultural climate could be measured against translational facts such as the introduction of foreign works previously banned by Soviet authorities (e.g., the first Soviet edition of Franz Kafka in 1965) and the introduction of contemporary foreign authors who were not necessarily aligned with the Communist Party (see Friedberg 1977).

12  Brian James Baer and Susanna Witt Restrictions on travel (and even on interaction with foreign tourists) that obtained to the end of the Soviet era added to the value of translated works as a source of information about societal and cultural phenomena in countries out of reach for ordinary readers. Thus the Russian context of reception in a way paralleled the situation in the early Western reception of Russian works, which, as discussed earlier, was informed by an ethnographic approach. During the 1960s, as in the eighteenth century, translation provided models for forms of culture not yet developed in the Russian target context, such as a specific youth culture. Here it is hard to overestimate the role played by the reintroduction of Ernest Hemingway in 1959 and the introduction of contemporary American authors such as Salinger and Vonnegut (Burak 2013; Leighton 1991; and Semenenko 2016). For the “last Soviet generation,” translations of Western fiction contributed to the creation of an “imaginary West” to no less a degree than rock music and film, as described by Aleksei Yurchak (2006). Nonetheless, due to the political aspect present as an a priori condition and, in particular, the prescriptions imposed by the doctrine of socialist realism, the Soviet import of Western literary works actualized problems of censorship on all levels of literary production, involving complex negotiations on the part of translators, editors and other censorial agents (Sherry 2015). Explored by Kuznetsova in the case of Hemingway, this is further addressed in the chapters by Alexandra Borisenko and Valerii Viugin with reference to the field of children’s literature. While Borisenko focuses on the Soviet appropriation of British children’s literature and various strategies of managing proscribed adaptive conventions, Viugin explores the specific challenge of handling cruelty, violence, and fear in imported and original children’s literature. These chapters foreground the crucial role played by two figures active across the dual contexts of children’s literature and translation (both generally considered “safe havens” for troubled authors)—namely, the writer, critic, and translator Kornei Chukovskii and the poet-translator Samuil Marshak. Their contribution to what has been labeled the “Soviet school of translation” (theoretical and discursive in the case of the former, practical in the case of the latter) is further elucidated by Maria Khotimsky in her chapter on tradition, subjectivity, and resistance to norm in Soviet poetry translation. The creative possibilities provided by translation in a context marked by stylistic as well as thematic taboos, illustrated in Khotimsky’s chapter with the case of the poet Mariia Petrovykh, are mapped out in greater detail by Katharine Hodgson in her chapter on Boris Slutskii’s translations from Bertolt Brecht as a dialogue with his deceased fellow poet-cum-translator Boris Pasternak. The work of the poet-translators discussed by Khotimsky and Hodgson are situated in the specific climate of post-Stalinist culture. The late-Soviet and post-Soviet contexts featured in Part III were marked by the increasingly relaxed censorship during the period of glasnost and

Introduction 13 the evolution of a commercial book market inaugurated by the reforms of perestroika in the late 1980s. Both factors in conjunction produced a flood of popular fiction in genres previously lacking in the Russian target system as well as foreign works on taboo topics. Several of the chapters in Part III trace shifts in the value of translated Western literature—from works of popular culture to established classics—before and after the fall of the Soviet Union. These shifts are addressed in Piet Van Poucke’s chapter, which maps peculiarities in the Russian reception of Western adventure fiction and its transformations over a period covering the fall of the USSR, while Aleksei Semenenko explores the boom in Hamlet translations that marked the first post-Soviet decades. Elena Ostrovskaya provides a case study of the various stages in the Russian reception of W. H. Auden through the lens of canonization, foregrounding the role of Joseph Brodsky both as translator and cultural broker. Ostrovskaya demonstrates how the rendering of foreign modernist authors sparked discussions of new forms in translation that had repercussions for Russian original literature as well (cf. Lygo 2013). The final two chapters of this volume challenge in fundamental ways the very concept of a “national” context. Vitaly Chernetsky analyzes the contributions of the versatile emigré poet Slava Mogutin across Russian and American cultural contexts, focusing on his search for Russian expressions of queer culture, again filling a gap in the target literature. In their concluding chapter, Daniele Monticelli and Eneken Laanes problematize the notion of context in a post-Soviet reality of restructured national space and within the new diasporas that have emerged as a consequence.

Notes 1 The same tendency has been observed for other contexts of reception, e.g., the Swedish one (see Håkanson 2012). 2 Consider Marijeta Bozovic’s monograph Nabokov’s Canon: From Onegin to Ada (Boszovic 2016), which provides a contextualization/conceptualization of Nabokov’s own enterprise: “to reimagine a canon of nineteenth- and twentiethcentury Western masterpieces with Russian literature as a central, rather than marginal, strain”, a canon which is “pointedly translingual and transnational and serves to legitimize his own literary practice” (blurb). 3 The evolution of the relationship between Church Slavonic and Russian has been defined as a trajectory from an initial diglossia to bilingualism, beginning in the fourteenth century, and to the eventual merging of elements from both languages in the modern Russian literary language that emerged in the early nineteenth century (Uspenskii 1994). 4 This flagship project, instituted to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the October revolution and represented as an heir to the Gorky initiative of the 1920s, provided Soviet readers with a 200-volume version of world literature, issued in 300,000 copies (after 1973, in 303,000 copies). Large print runs were also a feature distinguishing Soviet practices, rendering 50,000 to 100,000 copies a normal figure for translated fiction literature and not uncommon even for poetry.

14  Brian James Baer and Susanna Witt

References Angelelli, Claudia (ed.). 2012. The Sociological Turn in Translation and Interpreting Studies. Special issue. Translation and Interpreting Studies 7 (2). Appiah, Kwame Anthony. 1993. “Thick Translation.” Callaloo 16 (4): 808–819. Apter, Emily. 2013. Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability. London and New York: Verso. Baer, Brian James. 2000. “Iurii Trifonov 1925–1981.” In Encyclopedia of Literary Translation into English, Vol. 2, edited by Olive Classe, 1423–1425. Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn. Baer, Brian James (ed.). 2011. Contexts, Subtexts, Pretexts: Literary Translation in Eastern Europe and Russia. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Baer, Brian James. 2015. Translation and the Making of Modern Russian Literature. London: Bloomsbury. Baer, Brian James. 2016. “From International to Foreign: Packaging Translated Literature in Soviet Russia.” Slavic and East European Journal 60 (1): 49–67. Baer, Brian James and Natalia Olshanskaya (eds.). 2013. Russian Writers on Translation: An Anthology. Manchester: St. Jerome. Bozovic, Marijeta. 2016. Nabokov’s Canon: From Onegin to Ada. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Burak, Alexander. 2013. The Other in Translation: A Case for Comparative Translation Studies. Bloomington, Indiana: Slavica Publishers. Burnett, Leon and Emily Lygo (eds.). 2013. The Art of Accommodation: Literary Translation in Russia. Oxford: Peter Lang. Casanova, Pascale. 2010. “Consecration and Accumulation of Literary Capital: Translation as Unequal Exchange.” In Critical Readings in Translation Studies, edited by Mona Baker, 285–303. London and New York: Routledge. Cassin, Barbara (ed.). 2004. Vocabulaire européen des philosophies: dictionnaire des intraduisibles. Paris: Le Seuil/Le Robert. Cecherelli, Andrea, Lorenzo Constantino, and Cristiano Diddi (eds.). 2015. Translation Theories in the Slavic Countries. Europa Orientalis XXV. Salerno. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2007. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. Cho, Heekyoung. 2016. Translation’s Forgotten History: Russian Literature, Japanese Mediation, and the Formation of Modern Korean Literature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Chukovskii, Kornei and Nikolai Gumilev. 1919. Printsipy khudozhestvennogo perevoda [Principles of literary translation]. Moscow: World Literature. Clark, Katerina. 2011. Moscow, the Fourth Rome: Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Evolution of Soviet Culture, 1931–1941. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cooper, David. L. 2011. “Vasilii Zhukovskii as Translator and the Protean Russian Nation.” In Contexts, Subtexts and Pretexts: Literary Translation in Eastern Europe and Russia, edited by Brian James Baer, 55–77. Amsterdam / Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Coudenys, Wim. 2016. “Translation and the Emergence of History as an Academic Discipline in 18th Century Russia.” Kritika Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 17 (4): 721–752. Damrosch, David. 2003. What Is World Literature? Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.

Introduction 15 David-Fox, Michael. 2012. Showcasing the Great Experiment: Cultural Diplomacy and Western Visitors to Soviet Union 1921–1941. New York: Oxford University Press. Even-Zohar, Itamar. 1990. Polysystem Studies. Poetics Today 11.1. Franklin, Simon. 2002. Writing, Society and Culture in Early Rus, c. 950–1300. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Friedberg, Maurice. 1977. A Decade of Euphoria. Western Literature in PostStalin Russia, 1954–64. Bloomington, London: Indiana University Press. Friedberg, Maurice. 1997. Literary Translation in Russia. A Cultural History. University Park: Penn State Press. Globus, Gordon. 1995. The Postmodern Brain. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Håkanson, Nils. 2012. Fönstret mot öster: Rysk skönlitteratur i svensk översättning 1797–2010 med en fallstudie av Nikolaj Gogols svenska mottagande [Window to the east: Russian literature in Swedish translation with a case study of the Swedish reception of Nikolai Gogol]. Stockholm: Ruin. Harris, Susan. 2014. “Engaging the World.” In The Art of Empathy: Celebrating Literature in Translation, edited by Don Ball, 57–60. Washington, D.C.: National Endowment for the Arts. Hermans, Theo (ed.). 2006. Translating Others, Vol. 1–2. Manchester: St. Jerome. Inggs, Judith and Libby Meintjes (eds.). 2009. Translation Studies in Africa: Central Issues in Interpreting and Literary and Media Translation. London: Continuum. Inghilleri, Moira (ed.). 2005. Bourdieu and the Sociology of Translation and Interpreting. Special Issue. The Translator 11 (2). Khotimsky, Maria. 2013. “World Literature, Soviet Style: A Forgotten Episode in the History of the Idea.” Ab Imperio 3: 119–154. Lefevere, Andre. 1992. Translation, Rewriting, and the Manipulation of Literary Fame. London and New York: Routledge. Leighton, Lauren. 1991. Two Worlds, One Art. DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press. Levine, Suzanne Jill. 1991. The Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin American Fiction. Saint Paul: Graywolf Press. Likhachev, Dmitrii. 1987. Izbrannye raboty v trekh tomakh. T. 1. Razvitie russkoi literatury X–XVII vekov: Poetkia drevnerusskoi literatury. Leningrad: Khudozhestvennaia literatura. [Selected works in three volumes. Vol. 1. The development of Russian literature in the Xth to XVIIth centuries: The poetics of Old Russian literature] Lygo, Emily. 2013. “Free Verse and Soviet Poetry in the Post-Stalin Period.” In The Art of Accommodation: Literary Translation in Russia, edited by Leon Burnett and Emily Lygo, 265–284. Oxford: Peter Lang. Malia, Martin. 1999. Russia Under Western Eyes. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. May, Rachel. 1994. The Translator in the Text: On Reading Russian Literature in English. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. May, Rachel. 2000. “Russian Literary Translation into English.” In Encyclopedia of Literary Translation into English, edtied by Olive Classe, 1204–9. London: FitzroyDearborn. Menzel, Birgit, and Irina Alekseeva (eds.). 2013. Russische Übersetzungswissenschaft an der Schwelle zum 21. Jahrhundert (Ost-West-Express. Kultur und Übersetzung, Band 12). Berlin: Frank & Timme.

16  Brian James Baer and Susanna Witt Mueller-Vollmer, Kurt and Michael Irmscher. 1998. “Introduction.” In Translating Literatures. New Vistas and Approaches in Literary Studies, edited by K. Mueller-Vollmer and M. Irmscher, ix–xviii. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Nabokov, Vladimir. 1955. “Problems in Translation: Onegin in English.” Partisan Review 22 (4): 496–512. Niranjana, Tejaswini. 1992. Siting Translation: History, Post-Structuralism, and the Colonial Context. Berkeley: University of California Press. Robinson, Douglas. 1997. Translation and Empire: Postcolonial Theories Explained. Manchester: St. Jerome. Sakai Naoki. 2010. “Theory and Asian Humanity: On the Question of Humanitas and Anthropos.” Postcolonial Studies 13(4): 441–64. Sato-Rossberg, Nana and Judy Wakabayashi (eds.). 2012. Translation and Translation Studies in the Japanese Context. London: Continuum. Schippel, Larisa and Cornelia Zwischenberger (eds.). 2017. Going East: Discovering New and Alternative Traditions in Translation Studies. Berlin: Frank & Timme. Sears, Olivia E. 2014. “A Universe of Layered Worlds.” In The Art of Empathy: Celebrating Literature in Translation, edited by Don Ball, 42–45. Washington, D.C.: National Endowment for the Arts. Semenenko, Aleksei. 2016. “Smuggling the Other: Rita Rait-Kovaleva’s translation of J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye.” Translation and Interpreting Studies (special issue: Contexts of Russian Literary Translation, edited by Julie Hansen and Susanna Witt) 11.1: 64–80. Sherry, Samantha. 2015. Discourses of Regulation and Resistance: Censoring Translation in the Stalin and Khrushchov Era. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Schippel, Larisa, and Cornelia Zwischenberger (eds.). 2017. Going East: Discovering New and Alternative Traditions in Translation Studies. Berlin: Frank & Timme. Tak-hung Chan, Leo. 2004. Twentieth-Century Chinese Translation Theory: Modes, Issues and Debates. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Tyulenev, Sergey. 2012. Translation and the Westernization of Eighteenth-Century Russia: A Social-Systemic Perspective. Berlin: Frank & Timme. Uspenskii, Boris. 1994. Kratkii ocherk istorii russkogo literaturnogo iazyka (XI– XIX vv.) [A concise history of the Russian literary language] Moscow: Gnosis. Venuti, Lawrence. 2002. The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference. London and New York: Routledge. Venuti, Lawrence. 1995. The Translator’s Invisibility. London and New York: Routledge. Wakabayashi, Judy and Rita Kothari (eds.). 2009. Decentering Translation Studies: India and Beyond. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Watts, Richard. 2005. Packaging Post/Coloniality: The Manufacture of Literary Identity in the Francophone World. Lanham: Lexington Books. Witt, Susanna. 2013. “The Shorthand of Empire: ‘Podstrochnik’ Practices and the Making of Soviet Literature.” Ab Imperio 3: 155–190. Witt, Susanna. 2017. “Institutionalized Intermediates: Conceptualizing Soviet Practices of Indirect Literary Translation.” Translation Studies 10 (2): 1–17. Wolf, Michaela and Alexandra Fukari (eds.). 2007. Constructing a Sociology of Translation. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Yurchak, Aleksei. 2006. Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Part I

Pre-Soviet Contexts

1 Translation Strategies in Medieval Hagiography Observations on the Slavic Reception of the Byzantine Vita of Saint Onuphrius Karine Åkerman Sarkisian In the Saami version of the canonical account of the triumphal entry of Jesus into Jerusalem (beginning in Mark xi 2, Bible of 1713), the donkey on which Jesus rides into the city is replaced by a calf of a reindeer—a more familiar animal to the Saami audience (see Wilson 2008, 75). This can be seen as an instance of domesticating translation (Venuti 2008) or dynamic equivalence (according to Nida 1964), a practice that has been questioned by some scholars. Debating the issue, some critics claim that such an approach results in violations of historicity (see Zogbo, 2011, 25).1 Nevertheless, similar examples and other evidence of conscious text manipulation suggest this to be a widespread practice among medieval translators. The object of this study, consisting of a hagiographic story of Byzantine provenance in several linguistic traditions, also contains such deviations from the source text, which are often explained as translation errors. The chapter argues that certain deviations can be considered as deliberate choices on part of the medieval translator. Unheeded or neglected translation behaviors become apparent only when collating translations of the same text in different cultural contexts. The study focuses on translation features of the Byzantine Vita (Life) of St. Onuphrius at the time of its reception by medieval Slavs. The main question that will be addressed is whether lexical discrepancies can be considered translation strategies within the transmission of this text into a new cultural context.2 It should be noted that the study of the translation of medieval manuscripts presents a whole set of challenges specific to the period, partly because it is only in exceptionally rare cases that the protograph—i.e., the specific source text of the translation—can be identified and partly because researchers can never be certain that the full range of material is available and that every significant manuscript has been taken into account. Indeed, this is impossible in most cases. Within the Slavic tradition knowing when, where, or by whom a medieval translation was made is the exception rather than the rule. It is also known that a significant number of works were translated more than once, which is the case with the text under investigation. The very nature of manuscripts, which are

20  Karine Åkerman Sarkisian copied, recopied, and redacted by several anonymous scribes, each of whom leaves subtle clues as to his own linguistic individuality, occasionally contaminating versions of the text by consulting multiple versions of the account, is yet another factor that makes it difficult to determine the archetype (or the “ideal source text”) of a redaction or the original of a translation. This complicates the common notion of a simple opposition between original and translation. In addition, it is not always possible to distinguish clearly between a translation and a redaction of a medieval Slavic text, especially when one takes into consideration the fact that the scribe or editor of the text might have consulted a Greek original for reference. Thus, for the purposes of the present study, a distinction between translation and redaction is not very helpful with regard to medieval manuscripts, in particular within the confines of a specific text tradition. Since the distinction between a translation and a redaction is often debatable, this study offers a methodological approach that views text reception as a continuous process and translation as a collective and coherent series of manipulations of a certain text with the aim of bringing the narrative to a new audience. Accordingly, the study identifies and explicates lexical features that unify and distinguish manuscript branches at various stages in the cultural appropriation of the Onuphrius narrative up to the seventeenth century. It is important, therefore, to distinguish cases of conscious manipulation from pure misspellings and mistakes. Instead of comparing the source texts’ single representation in a concrete manuscript in the target language, the study takes into consideration evidences of text manipulation on the part of an editor or a translator within groups of text witnesses. The suggested approach is by no means indisputable, but it is a way of identifying features of text adaptation at the various stages of transmission to a new cultural environment. Several scholars have shown that medieval translators actually did reflect on and articulate the challenges of their work, taking as their starting point different approaches to the word and its dichotomy aisthéon ‘signans’—noéton ‘signatum’ and later glagol ‘word’—razum ‘sense’ (Matkhauzerova 1976; Bulanin 1995, 27; Franklin 2002). In the context of translation this opposition concerned form and sense (i.e., meaning), with the sense being primary. Nevertheless, the greater importance attributed to sense did not contradict the prescriptive word-by-word approach within the ambiance of a prevailing idea of the word as a primordial and eternal concept (Vereshchagin 1997, 37). John the Exarch emphasized that principle in the tenth century: [. . .] if the striving for an exact translation of the word leads to a distortion of the meaning of the text, then an exact, literal translation should not be used, but, on the contrary, equivalence of meaning should be preferred to the sameness of the form. (Matkhauzerova 1976, 33)3

Translation Strategies 21 Since the ideal of preserving both form and sense when bringing an utterance to another culture is unattainable, medieval translators were constrained to the practical aim of semantic equivalence, “focusing on how to render individual words, or, at best, small syntactic units” (Franklin 2002, 210, 215). Within this context, semantic rather than formal equivalence became the central issue in early translating activity. Given the codifying nature of the first renderings from the Greek to the Slavic context, the very first translators had an ambiguous mission: in addition to conveying the true word, Cyril and Methodius had a “term making” assignment (terminotvorchestvo, according to Vereshchagin, 1997). Their followers and subsequent writers, while rendering hagiographic texts, continued this foundational work. Medieval translators encountered a full range of translating challenges: from the rendering of sacred names and abstract concepts to mundane attributes of the source culture, which sometimes did not have an equivalent in the target language.4 How did they approach this kind of translation challenge? Can the material studied give the present-day reader any clue to the decision making of a medieval translator? In studying early Slavic translations, a synthesis of text-critical methods and linguistic analysis has become de rigueur and is considered the most reliable way of resolving complex questions of historical philology regarding the dating and lineage of early translations. Thus questions of attribution—establishing the authorship, authenticity, place, and linguistic affiliation of a translation—have come to dominate Slavic historical philology and to predetermine researchers’ priorities. Mapping linguistic features of a particular region and identifying local vocabulary and the area over which specific lexemes were current provides scholars with lexical data that serves as a reliable tool in the attribution of translations. Taking as its starting point theoretical perspectives developed within contemporary translation studies and based on a previous text-critical study of the Slavic tradition of the Life of Onuphrius, this study focuses on medieval translation in its own right, discussing puzzling textual elements, which may have been overlooked or dismissed in the past as mistakes or occasionalisms. The Life of the Byzantine St. Onuphrius the Hermit was probably first written in the fourth century, and certainly no later than the first half of the fifth, and was subsequently transferred to all cultures of early Christianity.5 “The Life,” which became highly popular throughout the Christian world, probably reached the Slavs in the eleventh or twelfth centuries within the body of hagiographic literature adopted from Byzantium.6 The story was obviously very well-liked by the Slavs, as it was copied and recopied as late as the nineteenth century. It takes the form of travel notes made by a certain monk Paphnutius, who recorded his pilgrimage to the desert. His account of Onuphrius is only one of the

22  Karine Åkerman Sarkisian episodes contained in “The Life,” and Onuphrius himself is one of eight hermits and ascetics whom Paphnutius encountered in the desert. Thus, the Vita hardly corresponds to the established canons of the hagiographical genre; rather, it resembles a sequence of edifying stories from the Skitskii Paterik (The Scete Paterikon).7 Indeed, the scholarly literature on the Life of Onuphrius the Hermit repeatedly points out the close connection between certain episodes in it and the stories in the Scete Paterikon. Moreover, it is claimed that one chapter from the Paterikon was interpolated into the Life of Onuphrius. This conclusion, drawn by specialists in the Greek and Latin traditions of St. Onuphrius (Nau 1905; William 1926), is confirmed by the Slavic material (Pak 2001; Åkerman Sarkisian 2007) and is significant for the exposition that follows. Three narratives of Onuphrius’ Life are known among Slavs: (a) the pilgrimage of Paphnutius (Peregrinatio Paphnutiana)—the primary and the most widespread tale of the saint, (b) the history of his birth and childhood (Legenda)—a secondary and rare construction, and (c) a hybridized version of the previous two, which does not seem to have been preserved in Greek. Unless otherwise stated, reference in this chapter is to the Peregrinatio. To date, over a hundred Slavic manuscripts of the Vita hav e been identified, representing at least three South Slav translations (two Serbian from the fourteenth century and one Bulgarian from the fifteenth century). Even more redactions, including East Slav (Russian, sixteenthcentury) revisions, have been established.8 Scholars who studied early Slavic translations confirm that the current practice of medieval translations from Greek into Church Slavonic may be characterized as verbatim, producing a text as close as possible to the original (Uspenskii 2002, 56–58). The approach of literal translation is known as kata poda (in Greek ‘following in the footsteps’), verbum verbo, fidus interpres, metaphrase (in John Dryden’s sense), formal equivalence (Nida 1964), or gloss translation, and is, moreover, characteristic not only of Slavic translations. According to Vereshchagin (1997, 22), it is the main translation technique in 98% of cases referring to Gospel translations. He proposes the term poslovnyi relating to single word correspondence—i.e., one word in the target text corresponds to one word in the source text. Such reverence toward the original text was the norm for translations of the scriptures. Simon Franklin argues instead for a distinction based “on the balance of choices between ‘true words’ and ‘equi-valence’ within the word-byword (or small unit by small unit) sequence” rather than the conventional distinction between “free” and “literal” translation (Franklin 2002, 215). Indeed, Eugene Nida (1964, 22) stated the “basic conflict in translation theory” as a fundamental difference between “two conflicting ‘poles’: (1) literal vs. free translating, and (2) emphasis on form vs. concentration on content.”

Translation Strategies 23 Referring to early Slavic translations, literal translation was, however, a general norm, and therefore applicable to the translation of liturgical and hagiographical texts, as well. This strategy preserves as far as possible the structure of the Greek language, not only at the syntactic level, but even at the level of derivational morphology, which sometimes allows for the reconstruction of the text of a lost Greek original by means of the reverse translation of a text that has been preserved, for example, only in the Slavic tradition.9 This principle of literal translation was applied also in the translation of the Vita of St. Onuphrius. The example that follows (Table 1.1) represents a small segment of the Vita that clearly illustrates the basic—verbum verbo—practice of the translation used in “The Life.”10

Table 1.1 Excerpt from Life of St. Onuphrius illustrating literal translation practice. Greek kai ChSl

anastas

eporeuthēn epi tessaras hēmeras eis

and after getting up [I] walked i v”stav” idokh” and after getting up [I] walked

for four chētȳ ri four

days dni days

tēn endo­teran erēmon

into the inner v” vni͡utr’ni͡ui͡u into the inner

desert pustȳ ni͡u desert

Greek

mēte

artou

mēte

hydatos

metalabōn

ChSl

neither ni neither

bread chlěba bread

nor ni nor

water vodȳ water

ingesting vkusiv” ingesting

Greek tē

de

tetartē

hēmera epistas

fourth chētvērtȳ ĭ zhē fourth [enclitic]

day dn’ day

spēlaiōi semnōi

ChSl

the [enclitic] v” on

reaching cave doidokh” vērt’pa [I] reached cave

large vēlika large

Greek

emeina

pros

tēn thyrida

krouōn

epi

hōran

mian

ChSl

[I] abode prēbykh” [I] abode

at u at

the window okont͡sa the window

knocking tl”kȳ knocking

for i͡ako about

hour chas’ hour

one edin” one

Greek

ep’ elpidi tou

kata

tēn synētheian

tōn adelphōn

ChSl

in the hope that naděi͡asi͡a hoping

in accordance with po in accordance with

the custom obȳ chai͡u custom

of the brethren mnish’skomu monastic

Greek

monachon tina

exelthein

kai

aspasasthai

me

auton

ChSl

a monk chērn’t͡siu͡ monk

come out izȳ iti come out

and i and

greet t͡sēlovaniē dati kiss (greeting)

me mi me

he

(Continued)

24  Karine Åkerman Sarkisian Table 1.1 (Continued) Greek

krousantos

de

mou

kai

mēdenos

apokrinomenou

ChSl

when knocked tl’knuvshu when knocked

[enclitic] zhē [enclitic]

I mně I

and i and

nobody nikomuzhē nobody

answered otvěshtai͡ushtu answered

Greek

aneōxas

tēn thyran,

eisēlthon

ChSl

opening otvěrz’ opening

the door dvēri, the door

[I] entered vnidokh [I] entered

[And after getting up I walked four days to the inner desert without ingesting bread or water. On the fourth day, I reached a reverent cave. I abode at the window knocking about one hour hoping that a monk might come out and give me a greet according to the monastic custom. When I knocked and no one answered me, I opened the door and went inside]. On the whole, the Slavic text shows a translation technique aimed at rendering the Greek original in a maximally exact manner, with only consideration of grammatical idiosyncrasies, such as the absence of the category of definiteness and the fixed syntactic position of clitics11 in Church Slavonic. Greek syntactic constructions in the last two sequences are rendered with a high degree of precision but not uncritically, thus, accusativus cum infinitivo in monachon tina exelthein kai aspasasthai corresponds to dativus cum infinitivo in the Slavic translation: chērn’t͡si͡u izȳiti, and the genitive construction krousantos de mou kai mēdenos apokrinomenou of the Greek text to dativus absolutus tl’knuvshu zhē mně i nikomuzhē otvěshtai͡ushtu of the Slavic text. At the same time, deviations from that norm are occasionally observed in the Vita, some of which might be seen as mistakes made by the translators.12 The following example reveals the problem of distinguishing errors committed by translators from errors by copyists: Greek: En mia tōn hēmerōn spoudēn epoiēsamēn eis tēn esōteran genesthai erēmon [One day I (1 sg.) felt willingness to go to the inner desert] ChSl: V ēdin ot dnii potshtanie s’tvorikhom” v” vnutr’ni͡uiu iti pustȳni͡u [One day we (1 pl.) felt willingness to go to the inner desert] This case of number disagreement of the verb in a story narrated by one person about his journey to the desert—the first-person plural of the Slavic instead of the first-person singular of the Greek text—can be found in a large number of manuscripts. Despite this fact, it is not possible with any certainty to claim it as an error of translation. Since several earlier

Translation Strategies 25 manuscripts contain the correct form of the verb, the error could have originated from the pen of a copyist. On the other hand, errors committed by a copyist, such as omissions, insertions, misspellings and misunderstandings, are more common and relatively easier to identify. For instance, depicting the death of Onuphrius, Paphnutius narrates how he entombed the body of the saint in a rock, which was like a cistern: iakozhe rov (in Greek: heurōn petran epikoilon hōsei lakkon). A group of East Slav (Russian) manuscripts (early sixteenth century) renders the same section by inserting the letter n: iako zhernov, distorting the meaning of this phrase to ‘like a millstone.’ It is clear that this mishap arose while the text was being copied as this reading appears in later Slavic (Russian) manuscripts. The hypercorrection is perfectly understandable bearing in mind the current practice of scriptura continua, a way of writing without spacing between the lexical units of the text. The Russian copyist may have erroneously segmented the sequence iakozherov in iako *zherov (instead of the perfectly correct iakozhe rov), amending it with the n to iako zhernov.13 A clear case of corrupt readings of a toponym from the Greek text is found in the episode recounting Paphnutius’s meeting with Onuphrius.14 In his account of his withdrawal into the desert, Onuphrius names the coenobitic monastery (of communal living) where he was educated among a hundred monks, which is actually the only biographical data recorded in the Vita. It refers to the ancient city of Hermopolis Magna (the largest city of Upper Egypt), known as Heremoupolis, where the monastery in question, Erete, was located (Timm 1984–1992, 1, 208). The Slavic translation of that passage represents variants of: v” manastȳri narit͡saēměm” ereti erim opolitov ermolita zakona fivait’skȳa stranȳ. The name of the monastery, Eriti, can be easily identified, while the geographical information regarding the location of the monastery, containing a chain of non-existent words followed by “law” and “land of Thebaion,” is stylistically cumbersome and is difficult to understand: erim opolitov ermolita zakona fivait’skȳa stranȳ. All Slavic manuscripts (except one South Slavic) reflect vain attempts to render the place name. Actually, it turns out that this toponym, common in monastic literature, is rendered in a distorted form already in the Greek tradition.15 Moreover, the meaning is corrupted in several ways, and the distortions seem to have occurred in four stages: a) A loss of the syllable -po- in Heremolitou, instead of Heremopolitou (the genitive of Eremopolis). Bios 1940–41: en . . . monastēriō kaloumenō Eriti tou Hermolytou nómou tēs Thēbaïōn chōras. b) The incorrectly segmented Erem-o(po)letou. Divided binomial variants of possessives, such as erim opolitov/ipolitov ermolita (also

26  Karine Åkerman Sarkisian ˘

relative adjective opolit’stse) of Slavic manuscripts could reflect a line break Herem-opolitou in certain Greek manuscripts. Thus, it seems that the divided form occurs initially in Greek copies, and from there is conveyed into the Slavic translations. c) The corrupt double toponym erim opolitov ermolita might reflect the practice of correcting remarks; here the gloss Heremopolitou (refering to the defective Hermolitou) of a Greek or a Slavic manuscript may have been interpolated into the text later by the copyist. d) The incorrect interpretation of the noun nómou (here in the genitive: nómou tēs Thēbaïōn chōras) led to the meaningless Slavic translation zakona fivait’skȳa stranȳ in the latter part of the phrase under discussion. The problem here probably arose as a result of the graphical similarity of the two Greek nouns ho nómos (genitive nómou—‘law’) and ho nomós (genitive nomoû, which refers to a district in Egypt— i.e., nome),16 due to an inaccurately placed or incorrectly interpreted accent mark. The noun nomós, as a term denoting province-division in Egypt, was apparently unfamiliar to the Slavic translator, which led to the incorrect zakona fivait’skȳa stranȳ. It is even more likely that the incorrectly rendered Greek genitive (nómou instead of nomoû) resulted from the inattentiveness of the scribes of the Greek copies and was thus translated by the Slavic translator, who had no reason to doubt the text of the Greek original. This assumption, however, needs to be verified by comparing a considerably larger number of Greek copies.17 There is another place name in the Vita called the Scete desert, corresponding to tēn Skētin (in the accusative case) in the Greek manuscripts. In the Slavic manuscripts it is rendered in two ways: as the proper name Scete in Serbian copies18 (in full accordance with several of the Greek sources), and as the common noun scete, turned into the plural sk’tȳ in Bulgarian as well as in East Slavic19 copies.20 Thus, the examples bear witness to a division of the meaning of the toponym, which probably took place already by the time of the Bulgarian translation. The earliest records of the toponym Scetis as a proper name date from the fourteenth century (SRIa, 200). A dubious gloss is found in one of the initial sections of the Vita. The noun tharsikarios appears only once and is thus a hapax legomenon, used by the desert hermit Timothy, when he tells Paphnutius about his occupation as a weaver in his secular life. This form represents the untranslated Greek word tharsēkarios, which might be unknown to the Slavic translators. In fact, it is still difficult to find an explanation of this noun in modern dictionaries. However, the Greek edition Bios 1940–41 explains the noun, stating that “another Greek manuscript has registered linuphikos” instead of tharsēkarios, which means some kind of woven fabric, tissue, or flax.

Translation Strategies 27 The list of all unintentional errors, misspellings, blunders, omissions, misunderstandings, and failures could be extended, but this is not the aim of this survey. It is much more interesting for the purposes of this study to consider instances of conscious strategies applied by translators or editors in their effort to convey a story to a new audience. Thus, the Vita translations sometimes exhibit deviations from the source text that cannot be explained linguistically. However, a lexical examination of the hagiographical corpus formed by the Life of Saint Onuphrius reveals a few variants that, at first sight, appear unmotivated, and that are difficult to explain as translation mistakes. Instead, translational phenomena of this type can, most likely, be considered as conscious translation strategies and explained with the help of concepts from contemporary translation studies. A comparison of several target texts of the Vita reveals puzzling lexical transformations. In an initial passage of the narrative, the pilgrim Paphnutius meets a desert hermit, a man covered in long hair as if wearing a garment, who appears at sunset among a herd of animals. He turns out to be the hermit Timothy mentioned earlier. The Greek text of “The Life” describes Timothy’s appearance in the midst of a herd of buffaloes: Plēroumenēs de tēs hēmeras ekeinēs, etheasamēn agelēn boubalōn erchomenēn kai adelphon en mesōi autōn peripatounta. The Coptic text, published in English translation, contains not buffaloes, but antelopes: “Afterwards, when the sun was setting, I looked up and I saw a herd of antelopes coming from a distance—with the brother running with them, naked” (Vivian 1996, 173), while the Slavic tradition reveals two readings: one of buffaloes of the Greek text (in the absolute majority of manuscripts), and another of camels, which is found only in two manuscripts. Considering that the episode is borrowed from the stories of the Egyptian hermits in the Scete Paterikon, it is logical to compare these translations with the corresponding piece in the Paterikon. The Paterikon21 describes the weaver (though unnamed here) surrounded by camels. This appears to be an example of the principle of adaptation or domesticating translation,22 replacing text elements that are exotic for the receiving culture with more familiar notions. Thus, assuming that the Paterikon represents an earlier composition, a chain of domestications may be suggested beginning with the original herd of camels of Egypt being eventually transformed into buffaloes within the Greek hagiographical discourse and scattered throughout neighboring communities.23 Nevertheless, irrespective of this fact, as we find both camels and buffaloes in the same linguistic tradition it is obvious that domesticating is not applied consistently, which might be a matter of various translations made at different points of time. In its turn, if that is the case and keeping in mind that camels reflect a primary stage of the narrative (from earlier camels in the Paterikon to subsequent camels and buffaloes in “The Life”), one can presumably suppose that domesticating is a later

28  Karine Åkerman Sarkisian phenomenon in the reception of a text in a new culture. Moreover, it seems to be secondary in nature, rather arbitrary, not regular at all. This assumption implies a methodological gain for the intricate issue of dating translations (at least in the Slavic philology). But to be reliable this supposition must be proved on a larger number of instances in a separate study. Another example of the domesticating strategy is found in the late Slavic version of the Vita (the hybridized one), which could have reached the Slavs via Latin as the Greek tradition lacks this version. In this depiction of a white-haired older hermit, whom the narrator Paphnutius meets after burying Saint Onuphrius, the simile “milk” is used to describe his hair: “white as milk.” Due to the lack of a Greek correspondence to this version, the Latin parallel passage of “The Life” was consulted. The same elders’ hair is depicted there with the metaphor “snow”: “white as snow.” Perhaps “milk” as a metaphor for whiteness was considered more idiomatic for the Slavic audience than snow. An example from a passage in the Bible that likewise uses the metaphor “white as snow” was commented on by Eugene Nida when arguing for dynamic equivalence in translation with respect to the receptor language. This would appear to be an accepted adaptation technique also in translations of the scriptures, revealing various ways of rendering the metaphor, such as “white egret feathers,” or “white as fungus,” and so on (Nida 1974, 4). It is obvious that such phenomena are impossible to isolate without comparing several text witnesses within the transmission tradition of a medieval text. A converse strategy in translation can be seen in the treatment of the toponym Egypt in a group of manuscripts of a Bulgarian recension from the fifteenth century.24 The scribe appears to have deliberately avoided this very common place name in early Byzantine hagiography. In these manuscripts, all five occurrences of the toponym Egypt are consistently replaced, in four cases by the word mir (‘world’ and in one by kel’i͡a ‘cell’). The lexeme mir might be seen as representing Misr, the biblical name for Egypt, the derivation being mir < Misr < Misrayim, where Misr means ‘Egypt,’ and -ayim is the dual suffix, referring to the original meaning of the name having been ‘the two Egypts’—i.e., Upper and Lower (Zalizniak 2000, 45). However, this hypothesis is completely debunked by the example of kel’i͡a. All attempts to find a cultural or even ideological explanation for this phenomenon have been fruitless. Thus, the two arguments (the first, that the toponym was replaced deliberately, and the second, that this replacement is confined to one group of manuscripts) speak convincingly in favor of the active involvement of the scribe, be it the translator or the editor, who replaced the culturally marked, local term “Egypt” with general words, such as “world” or “cell.” This strategy endeavors to make the text universal by removing lexical localisms and cultural markers.

Translation Strategies 29 It is remarkable that, when the analysis is extended to include several linguistic traditions, various translation strategies become apparent. Thus, the date of the saint’s death (12 June) is localized according to the dateformatting standard in each target-cultural context: in Coptic manuscripts the date is as 16 Paoni, in Armenian it is Margatsi 6, according to the local calendar, and so on. This strategy of localization as a basic principle of content management is of great importance in the cultural adaptation of the content of the transferred text. Curiously enough, one South Slav manuscript indicates the date according to two calendars, the Coptic and ͡ 25 the Roman: 16 bo paūma po egūptěněkh 11 po rūmom ii͡unę mesętsa. However, in the Church Slavonic translation of “The Life,” not all attributes of the source culture that may be perceived as exotic in the target culture are exposed to domesticating or globalizing strategies. On the contrary, in the description of the oasis where Paphnutius ended his wanderings, untranslated Greek words are merely listed in transliteration, such as zinzifi (zízypha26 ‘jujube’), kitra (kítra ‘citrus fruit’), mersiny (myrsínai ‘myrtle’), rodia (rhodiá rose or rhóai ‘pomegranates’), and ͡ (phoínika ‘fig’). None of these exotic fruits is replaced with a plant finitsi or fruit more familiar to the Slavic reader. This is arguably not a matter of inconsistency on the part of the translator, nor is it a mere difference in the treatment of flora and fauna. Rather, it appears to be the result of a conscious strategy on the translator’s part, although in this case the chosen strategy is the opposite of the principle of domestication outlined earlier—namely, exoticization (according to Venuti 2008, 160). These exotic lexical elements are concentrated in the final episode of the narrative, which describes the unusual, unearthly beauty of the oasis, which the pilgrim discovers in the midst of the lifeless desert, sun-parched, and full of perils. This depiction of a fragrant garden with its life-giving spring, wondrous vegetation, and fruit-bearing trees provides an image of paradise. For the purposes of this text, the image of the unattainable, unearthly paradise must be represented as desirable and attractive, yet also out of the ordinary, beyond reach, and exotic—hence the exoticism of its concrete details. This might serve as a reasonable interpretation of the use of such unlocalized words. In their decisions and choices, medieval translators seemed to have been guided at times by the commission, displaying a hybrid conception of skopos, as elaborated by Hans J. Vermeer: The skopos theory thus in no way claims that a translated text should ipso facto conform to the target culture behaviour or expectations, that a translation must always “adapt” to the target culture. This is just one possibility: the theory equally well accommodates the opposite type of translation, deliberately marked, with the intention of expressing source-culture features by target-culture means.

30  Karine Åkerman Sarkisian Everything between these two extremes is likewise possible, including hybrid cases. (Vermeer 2000, 231) This study reveals a consciousness of the target audience on the part of these medieval translators, despite the strong pull of literalness, which was the dominant approach of the time, especially in regard to sacred texts.

Conclusions The material of early hagiographic translations reveals that “conflict poles” (literal vs free rendering) claimed as inherent to the nature of the translation are not necessarily in opposition.27 Medieval translators could practice a prescribed model of formal equivalence while occasionally applying elements of dynamic equivalence in order to achieve the desired aim of their translating mission. This chapter argues for the competency of medieval translators, their ability to bring the source text to the target language audience taking into consideration a whole range of translation strategies. These pioneers were presumably struggling with translation issues not unlike those of today, related to the task of navigating amid a variety of linguistic options in order to approximate the impact of the message in the target culture with the highest degree of affinity to the response in the source culture, as Nida (1964) put it. Such an understanding of early translation practice recognizes that “medieval translators constantly demonstrate their superior knowledge and abilities while assisting less able readers and hearers” (Discenza 2005, 128). Such an approach to medieval translation practice differs from the common view of translators of that period as not skillful enough to find equivalents, or as rendering some lexemes one way and other lexemes another way simply because they confused the names of animals and did not know the names of the plants at all. The tradition of the translated Life of Onuphrius the Hermit suggests that early translators, oriented though they were toward a strictly literal style of translation, nonetheless permitted themselves isolated but deliberate deviations from the established literalist norms. There is no reason to doubt that they pondered translation variants, applying ones that were consistent with their idea of the source text and its aim within the target culture. As we have seen, early translators, though they were restrained by a strict canon of fidelity to the source text, nevertheless positioned elements of the foreign text in the receiving readers’ milieu or avoided doing so in an “ethnodeviant” (according to Lawrence Venuti 2008, 15) way. Thus, translation strategies resembling what we today call localization, domestication, and exoticization appear to have been applied by medieval translators. Accordingly, the translator’s priorities in choosing particular vocabulary can be seen as part of a conscious practice. Different

Translation Strategies 31 translation strategies represented practical choices for medieval translators as they do for contemporary translators, reflecting, perhaps, the very nature of text rendering across languages and cultures.

Notes 1 The question addressed by Lynell Zogbo (2011, 25) was: “[. . .] is it permissible for translators to substitute an animal such as a seal in the key phrase ‘the lamb of God’, in Arctic cultures where sheep are not well known?” 2 The name of the saint is rendered here in accordance with the conventional spelling tradition. Also, the epithet of Onuphrius varies in different sources, ranging from Onuphrius the Great to Onuphrius the Hermit, or even Onuphrius of Egypt. 3 The author is most grateful to Ralph Cleminson (Oxford), who helped with translations into English and offered very valuable comments and useful suggestions. My warm thanks to Julie Hansen (Uppsala), who read several drafts of this work and made numerous constructive suggestions. Special thanks to Johan Heldt (Uppsala) for detailed, critical comments. I also wish to acknowledge the contributions and influence of Susanna Witt, in particular her always unerring questions, though I wish to note that any mistakes are my own. Finally, I offer my deep gratitude to Brian Baer for his editorial help. 4 Francis Thomson reminds us of the terms of medieval translators’ work: “Not only were translators labouring without dictionaries and grammars at their disposal, they were also frequently tackling works written up to five hundred (and by the fourteenth century one thousand) years previously in a language far removed from the contemporary Greek language which they knew” (Thomson 1988, 380). 5 The earliest evidence of the veneration of St. Onuphrius among the Slavs is provided by several sources: the Studite Typicon, translated in 1068–1074 (Pentkovskii 2001, 41), which prescribes that the saint should be commemorated at matins on 12 June; and likewise by representations of the saint in ancient frescoes and by graffiti with prayers. The earliest graffiti (1089–1091) are to be found on the walls of St. Sophia Cathedral in Kiev (Vysotskii 1966, 47). There are also parchment fragments of a service to St. Onuphrius dated to the twelfth century and a large number of churches in the various Slavic lands dedicated to him. 6 The adoption of Christianity by the Slavs brought with it numerous works of Byzantine ecclesiastical literature, including hundreds of hagiographical texts (Kliuchevskii 1871; Sobolevskii 1903 [1989]; Fedotov 1946, 41 and others). The hagiographic genre, thanks to its moral and didactic character, was particularly suited to conveying the ideas of the Orthodox clergy to the newly converted Rus’. 7 The Scete Paterikon is the Slavic translation of the Apophthegmata Patrum (AP)—a collection containing early monastic sayings and tales of desert fathers for the purpose of moral education (see Veder 2012). 8 For an extensive overview see Åkerman Sarkisian 2007. 9 This was the case with the Life of St. Nicetas the Confessor, Abbot of Medikion, by Theosterictus (see Afinogenov 2001). 10 The Slavic text (Life) of the manuscript RGB, 304/I-39 and the Greek text (BHG 1379) of the edition in Hagioreitike Bibliotheke (Bios 1940–41), based on the manuscript (Athos, Megiste Lavra, cod. I 117, fol. 300v–315r) are cited. 11 For an exposition of the evolution of enclitics in a later period, see Andrei Zalizniak 2008.

32  Karine Åkerman Sarkisian 12 A preliminary typology of errors in early Slavic translations is traced by Francis Thomson (1988), who at the same time exhorts “hypercritical detractors” to remember that early translations should be judged according to their historical context, paying tribute to the early translators as those who laid “the foundation of Slav literary culture” (Thomson 1988, 380). See also the Dmitrii Bulanin’s remark to Francis Thomson’s list of errors in Bulanin 1995. 13 Significantly, a few manscripts contain a correction of this misspelling in the margin (see RNB Pog.1321, BAN Arkh. D.84), whereas one manuscript (BAN Arkh. D.154) reflects the obvious evidence of erroneously inserted letter. 14 For a detailed analysis of place names in the Vita see Åkerman Sarkisian 2009. 15 This fact allows us to draw the conclusion that precisely the Greek text of the Life as preserved in Bios 1940–41 formed the basis for the version that was most widespread among the Slavs. Following this hypothesis and orienting ourselves on the earliest dating of the copies of the mentioned groups, it is relevant to date the occurrence of this translation to no later than the early fifteenth century. 16 Nome (in nomós) is of the districts into which Egypt was divided (Liddell and Scott 1999, 535), or an administrative unit, “district, region, nome (in Egypt, Babylon, Persia and with the Scythians)” (Dvoretskii 1958, II, 1138). 17 A tentative reconstruction of that section should be “. . . in a monastery named Erete, in (the city of) Hermopolis, in the nome (jurisdiction) of Thebaid” or “in the Hermopolis monastery of Erete, which is in the nome of Thebaid”: In Greek: . . . en monastēriō kaloumenō Eriti tou Hermoupolitou nomoû tēs Thēbaïōn chōras. In Slavic: . . . v” manastȳri narit͡saēměm” eriti ermopolitova noma fivait’skȳa stranȳ. 18 HM SMS 472 Hilandar fourteenth century; Mih. IIIc22 fourteenth century; RGB f.310–1254 fifteenth century. 19 See for example BAR Ms. sl.154 fifteenth century; RGB 304/I-39 fifteenth century, etc. 20 Both uses of the noun were established according to dictionaries. The common noun “scete” (given in plural) is explained in the encyclopedia of Brockhaus and Efron (1900, 200) as “. . . cells for secluded hermits, built in connection to larger monasteries and more or less removed from them.” Further, it is explained as a singular name “scete,” “once meant definite seclusion and solitude, now often consists of a smaller number of brethren. [. . .] Former Scetes are now often called coenobium, i.e. communities, where the coenobites had everything in common.” Sophocles’ dictionary, on the other hand (Sophocles 1900, 995), contains only one definition of the toponym Skitis or Skētis: “a place in Egypt near Mareotes, on the borders of Libya.” 21 The manuscript RNB Sol. 647/705 containing Paterikon is consulted. 22 Other terms, with analogous meanings, are current in the scholarly literature— e.g., dynamic equivalence (Nida 1964) in a sociolinguistic approach, aiming to produce the same effect in the translation as in the original text (contrary to formal equivalence or “gloss translation”), naturalization, in cultural translation studies (Carbonell 1996), covert translation, in contrastive study of discourse analysis (House 2007), and in instrumental translation (Nord 2006). 23 As regards the antelopes in Coptic manuscripts, their emergence seems to be caused by the semantic ambiguity of the noun ho boúbalos denoting in fact several animals or by the confusion of two externally similar proper nouns. Thus, both Greek words ho boúbalos “buffalo” and hélaphos “deer”

Translation Strategies 33 correspond to the same Coptic word shosh or shash, depending on the dialect (Crum 1939, 605). Some scholars argue for a confusion of two Greek words: ho boúbalos (-ou) “buffalo” and he boúbalis (-ios) or he boubalís (-idos) “antelope,” which is reflected in Crum’s Coptic dictionary (see Malevez 2011, 108). Thanks to Samuel Rubenson (Lund) for his advice about the Coptic reference. 24 Mss: BAR Ms. sl. 154; RNB Pog. 803 (2096); Dragomirna 1828 (739); NBKM 443 (650). 25 The date of the Onuphrius feast has varied over time among and within churches (East, as well as West). It has altered between June 10, 11, 12, and even 13 in the sixteenth century (see for instance Stieglecker 2001, 199–201), a circumstance which is also reflected in the saint’s narrative of manuscripts. 26 Greek forms as they appear in the source text are given in brackets. 27 This statement is in some accordance with observations made by Palma Zlateva (1995), who argues that Tory’s binary notions “adequacy” and “acceptability” are not polar opposites. Instead of an axis with “adequacy” and “acceptability” as its poles, she suggests another axis, or rather, a cline with “adequacy” as one pole and “mistranslation” as the other (see Zlateva 1995, 36).

References Manuscript sources BAN Arkh. D.84  (BAN = Library of the Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg) BAN Arkh. D.154 BAR Ms. sl. 154 (BAR = Romanian Academy Library, Bucharest) Dragomirna 1828 (739)  (Dragomirna = Museum of the Dragomirna monastery, Moldavia) Hilandar HM SMS 472  (Hilandar = the Hilandar monastery, Mount Athos, Greece) NBKM 443 Mih. IIIc22  (NBKM = SS Cyril and Methodius National Library of Bulgaria) NBKM 443 (650) RGB, 304/I-39  (RGB = the Russian State Library, Moscow) RGB f.310–1254 RNB Sol. 647/705  (RNB = the National Library of Russia, St. Petersburg) RNB Pog. 803 (2096) RNB Pog.1321

Print sources Afinogenov, Dmitrii E. 2001. “Zhitie sv. ispovednika Nikity, igumena Midikiiskogo.” [The life of St. Nicetas the confessor, the abbot of medikion]. In Zhitie prepodobnogo ottsa nashego Konstantina, chto iz iudeev [The Life of Saint Constantine the Jew], 147–159. Moscow: Indrik. Åkerman Sarkisian, Karine. 2007. Zhitie Onufriia Pustynnika v rukopisnoi traditsii srednevekovoi Rusi [Vita of St. Onuphrius in the medieval Russian manuscript tradition]. Uppsala: Uppsala University Press. Åkerman Sarkisian, Karine. 2009. “Oshibki v toponimike kak tekstologicheskii kriterii pri issledovanii perevodnykh pamiatnikov.” [Translation mistakes in

34  Karine Åkerman Sarkisian toponyms as a criterion in text critical studies]. In Scripta & e-Scripta: The Journal of Interdisciplinary Mediaeval Studies 7: 121–134. Sofia: Boyan Penev. BHG = Bibliotheca hagiographica Graeca. Mise à jour et considérablement augmentée par François Halkin. 3rd ed., 3 vol. (Brussels, 1957), and Novum auctarium Bibliothecae hagiographicae Graecae (Brussels, 1984). Bios 1940–41 = “Ho bios tou hagiou Onouphriou tou Aigyptiou” [The life of Saint onuphrius the egyptian]. Hagioreitike Bibliotheke 5: 23–35. Volos. Brockhaus, Friedrich and Il’ia Efron. 1900. Entsiklopedicheskii slovar’ [Encyclopedic dictionary], Vol. XXX. St. Petersburg: Izdatel’skoe delo. Bulanin, Dmitrii M. 1995. “Drevniaia Rus’ [Old rus’].” In Schöne Literatur in russischer Übersetzung: Von den Anfängen bis zum 18. Jahrhundert: Teil I. Prosa, edited by Iurii D. Levin, 17–73. Köln, Weimar, Wien: Böhlau. Carbonell, Ovidio. 1996. “The Exotic Space of Cultural Translation.” In Translation, Power, Subversion, edited by R. Álvarez and M. Carmen-Africa Vidal, 79–98. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Crum, Ewing Walter. 1939. A Coptic Dictionary. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Discenza, Nicole Guenther. 2005. King’s English: Strategies of Translation in the Old English Boethius. Ithaca, NY: State University of New York Press. Dvoretskii, Iosif Kh. 1958. Drevnegrechesko-russkii slovar’ [Old Greek-Russian dictionary] I–II. Мoscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo inostrannykh i natsio­ nal’nykh slovarei. Fedotov, George P. 1946. The Russian Religious Mind: Kievan Christianity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Franklin, Simon. 2002. Writing, Society and Culture in Early Rus, c. 950–1300. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. House, Juliane. 2007. “Translation Criticism: From Linguistic Description and Explanation to Social Evaluation.” In Lexical Complexity: Theoretical Assessment and Translational Perspectives, edited by M. Bertuccelli Papi, G. Capelli and S. Masi, 37–52. Pisa: Pisa University Press. Kliuchevskii, Vasilii O. 1871. Drevnerusskie zhitiia sviatych kak istoricheskii istochnik [Old Russian lives of saints as a historical source]. Edited by K. Soldatenkov. Moscow: Grachev and K. Liddell, Henry George and Robert Scott. 1999 [repr. 1889]. An Intermediate Greek-English Lexicon Founded upon the Seventh Edition of Liddell and Scott’s Greek-English Lexicon. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Malevez, Marc. 2011. Introduction à la démarche spirituelle des moines errants de l’Egypte copte (251–450): Une étude fondée sur la “Mission de Paphnuce” et sur les principales sources littéraires du monachisme errant de l’époque concernée, Unpublished PhD Thesis. Matkhauzerova, Svetla [Mathauserová, světla]. 1976. Drevnerusskie teorii iskusstva slova [Old Russian theories of verbal art]. Prague: Univerzita Karlova. Nau, François. 1905. “Le chaiptre Peri anachōrētōn hagiōn et les sources de la Vie de Saint Paul de Thèbes.” Revue de l’Orient Chrétien 10: 385–417. Paris: Librairie A. Picard et fils. Nida, Eugene. 1964. Toward a Science of Translation. Leiden: E. J. Brill. Nida, Eugene. 1974. The Theory and Practice of Translation. Leiden: E. J. Brill. Nord, Christiane. 2006. Text-Analysis in Translation: Theory, Methodology and Didactic Application of a Model for Translation-Oriented Text Analysis. Amsterdam: Rodopi.

Translation Strategies 35 Pak, Natal’ia V. 2001. “K probleme zhitiia Aleksandra Svirskogo: perevodnye zhitiia.” [The problem of alexander of svir: Translated lives]. In Knizhnye tsentry Drevnei Rusi: Severnorusskie monastyri [Book centres of old rus’: Northern Russian monasteries], edited by S. A Semiachko, 145–151. St. Petersburg: DB. Pentkovskii, Aleksei M. 2001. Tipikon patriarkha Aleksiia Studita v Vizantii i na Rusi [The typikon of patriarch alexis the studite in byzantium and in rus’]. Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Moskovskoi Patriarkhii. SRIa. = Bogatova, Galina A (ed.). 1999. Slovar’ russkogo iazyka XI–XVII vv. vypusk 24. Moscow: Nauka. Sobolevskii, Aleksei I. 1903 [repr. 1989]. “Perevodnaia literatura v Moskovskoi Rusi XIV–XVII vekov.” [Translated literature in moscovian rus’ of XIV–XVII centuries]. In Bibliograficheskie materialy: Sbornik otdeleniia russkogo iazyka i slovesnosti Imperatorskoi Akademii nauk, LXXIV: 1. St. Petersburg: Tipografiia Imperskoi Akademii nauk [repr. in bausteine zur geschichte der literatur bei den slaven, edited by H.-B. Harder and H. Rothe and R. Olesch, Vol. 34. Köln, Wien: Böhlau]. Sophocles, Evangelinus A. 1900. Greek Lexicon of the Roman and Byzantine Periods (from B. C. 146 to A. D. 1100). New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Stieglecker, Roland. 2001. Die Renaissance eines Heiligen: Sebastian Brandt und Onuphrius eremita. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag. Thomson, Francis J. 1988. “Towards a Typology of Errors in Slavonic Translations.” In Christianity Among the Slavs: The Heritage of Saint Cyril and Methodius (Orientalia Christiana Analecta, 231), edited by Edward G. Farrugia, Robert F. Taft and Gino K. Piovesana, 351–380. Roma: Pont. Institutum Studiorum Orientalium. Timm, Stefan. 1984–1992. Das christlich-koptische Ägypten in arabischer Zeit: Eine Sammlung christlicher Stätten in Ägypten in arabischer Zeit, unter Ausschluß von Alexandria, Kairo, des Apa-Mena-Klosters (Dēr Abū Mina), der Skētis (Wādi n-Naṭrūn) und der Sinai-Region, Teil 1–6. Wiesbaden. Uspenskii, Boris A. 2002. Istoriia russkogo literaturnogo iazyka (XI–XVII vv.) [History of the Russian literary language (XI–XVII c.)]. Moscow: Aspekt Press. Veder, William R. 2012. The Scete Paterikon: Patericon Sceticum: Skitskii Paterik. Pegasus Oost-Europese Studies 12. Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Pegasus. Venuti, Lawrence. 2008. The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation. London and New York: Routledge. Vereshchagin, Evgenij M. 1997. Istoriia vozniknoveniia drevnego obshcheslavianskogo literaturnogo iazyka: Perevodcheskaia deiatel’nost’ Kirilla i Mefodia i ikh uchenikov [History of the origin of the old common slavic literary language: The translation activites of cyril and methodios and their disciples]. Moscow: Martis. Vermeer, Hans J. 2000. “Skopos and Commission in Translational Action.” In The Translation Studies Reader, edited by Lawrence Venuti, 221–232. London and New York: Routledge. Vivian, Tim. 1996. Journeying into God. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Vysotskii, Sergei A. 1966. Drevnerusskie nadpisi Sofii Kievskoi. XI–XIV vv. [Old Russian inscriptions in sofia of kiev. XI–XIV centuries]. I. Kiev: Naukova dumka.

36  Karine Åkerman Sarkisian Williams, Charles Allyn. 1926. Oriental Affinities of the Legend of the Hairy Anchorite. Universiry of Illinois Studies in Language and Literature 10: 4. The University of Illinois Press. Wilson, Karin. 2008. Markusevangeliet i Lars Rangius samiska översättning från 1713 [The gospel of mark in lars rangius’s saami translation of 1713]. Uppsala: Acta Academiae Regiae Gustavi Adolphi. Zalizniak, Andrei A. 2000. “Lingvistika po A. T. Fomenko [Linguistics according to fomenko].” Voprosy iazykoznaniia 6: 33–68. Zalizniak, Andrei A. 2008. Drevnerusskie enklitiki [Old Russian enclitics]. Moscow: Iazyki slavianskikh kul’tur. Zlateva, Palma. 1995. “Translation: Text and Pre-Text ‘Adequacy’ and ‘Acceptability’ in Crosscultural Communication.” In Translation, History, and Culture, edited by Susan Bassnet and André Lefevere, 29–37. New York: Cassel. (First published in Great Britain in 1990). Zogbo, Lynell. 2011. “Bible, Jewish and Christian.” In Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, 2nd Edn., edited by M. Baker and G. Saldanha, 21–27. London and New York: Routledge.

2 Metatext Verbalization in Early and Modern Russian Translations Tatiana Pentkovskaya and Anastasia Urzha

Introduction This article represents one of the first attempts to establish a dialogue between two linguistic traditions in the study of translated texts in Russia. The one tradition deals with translations produced in the language of Old Church Slavonic (the first Slavic literary language used for translating the Bible and other Ancient Greek ecclesiastical texts), and the other concerns contemporary Russian translations. These traditions have always been studied separately, justified by the different linguistic material and the vast cultural and linguistic differences between the chosen epochs. Nevertheless, the same linguistic objects can be found in corpora of both disciplines, and the functioning of these objects reveals significant similarities that can add to our knowledge of text interpretation in general and contribute to the study of continuities between these two Russian cultural traditions. The linguistic object in question is the metatextual operator, a discourse marker that expresses the speaker’s attitude toward the information he or she reports. On the one hand, such operators do not denote the events of the fabula, and so their omission or relocation in translation does not usually affect the plot. On the other hand, metatext has great importance for the rendering of the “voice” of the narrator and of any other speaker in the translated text. The first part of the investigation has been carried out by Tatiana Pentkovskaya on the basis of Church Slavonic translations of the pre-Mongol period (eleventh to thirteenth centuries), such as The Life of Basil the Younger, The Life of Andrew the Fool, The History of the Jewish War, The Bee, and some others. The second part of the research (carried out by Anastasia Urzha) is based on a corpus of modern Russian translations of English and American narratives, published from the end of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twenty-first. This corpus includes translations of prose by Edgar Allan Poe, Oscar Wilde, Arthur Conan Doyle, H. G. Wells, O. Henry, Mark Twain, Jerome K. Jerome, Pamela Travers, Ray Bradbury, Anthony Burgess, Richard Bach, and C. S. Lewis (27 original texts; 107 translated

38  Tatiana Pentkovskaya and Anastasia Urzha texts). During the first stage of the investigation the texts of each writer were studied separately. Comparative analysis focused on the syntax and style of the original and the translations; data from contemporary dictionaries and grammars were also taken into account. At the second stage the numerous contexts that included metatextual operators were registered and compared. There can be no doubt that the interpretation of metatext in these narratives depends on the genre of the text, the author’s style, and the target audience of each translation. In fact, the reconstruction (or omission) of metatextual operators in the Russian translation of each of the texts of any of the authors mentioned earlier could be the object of an individual study, as any changes in the use of metatextual operators affect the image of the narrator and, consequently, the style and image of the author in the receiving culture. But the aim of this joint research project is to mark general similarities in the selected cases in order to explore the pragmatic potential of metatextual operators, their relation to the time and modality of the narrative from the ancient period to the present time. Such observations could be helpful in drawing the attention of translators to these important elements.

General Remarks When comparing different translations of the same narrative, a researcher may notice that some elements of the semantic structure of the text are more stable than others. The plot elements, their temporal relations, and the set of actors stay mostly the same, while the words denoting the narrator’s activity, can change significantly from one translation to another. Discourse and register analysis (especially in regard to tenor), discussed in translation studies by Juliane House (1997) and Mona Baker (1992/ 2011), and the focus on the pragmatic level of translated texts offered by Basil Hatim and Ian Mason (1997), show the great potential of studying how original metatext is rendered in translation. More recent research on rendering interpersonal meanings in translation (expressed in forms of address, modality, pronoun choice etc.) by Jeremy Munday (2012) also supports this research direction. Some comparative studies concentrate on one selected group of linguistic means used to express the modality of the text, for example, Itamar Even-Zohar’s examination of void pragmatic connectives in translation (1982 / 1990). Based on the concept of metatext as developed by Anna Wierzbicka (Vezhbitskaia 1978) and the concept of the metalingual function of language as introduced by Roman Jakobson (1960), our research focuses on metatextual operators. Metatextual operators, such as first of all, as a matter of fact, so to say, and thus, are compared to “threads” that only “clarify ‘the semantic pattern’ of the basic text” for the reader or listener (Vezhbitskaia 1978, 421), and are separate from the message itself. Compared to the notion

Metatext Verbalization 39 of discourse markers, applied in comparative and translation studies (e.g., Fleischmann and Yaguello 2004), metatext is more strictly defined as a metalingual commentary (though sometimes including axiological or epistemic components). Studying metatextual operators in translation, we can focus our attention on the meanings, which can vary significantly in the translated versions of the same text. The phemonenon of “unstable” metatext can be traced from early translations to modern ones.

Metatext in Early Translations In Old Church Slavonic translations of religious texts (appearing during the eleventh to thirteenth centuries in Russia), where the interpreter follows the principle of word-for-word translation, we find regular use of metatextual operators, that direct the attention of the addressee to the narrated facts. Among the metatextual operators, expressions that make explicit reference to the speech act itself stand out (Vezhbitskaia 1978, 407, 421). These are the so-called braces—i.e., “phrases able to introduce metatextual senses into the utterance and text.” Braces consist, first of all, of performative verbs grammatically expressed by the first person: “I say” (Loseva 2004). For example, in the Life of St. Basil the Younger (translation allegedly made in Kiev in the late eleventh century), Gregory, a disciple of St. Basil, enters into a double dialogue: with God in a vision of the Last Judgment and with himself in a mental dialogue: Poias ekklēsias diēgēsomai, efaskon en tē hemautou diakonia, ou gar edokoun optasian einai to theōroumenon—kym ts(e)rkvam ispověm reku v pomyshlenii moem. ibo mnękh viděnie sushte vidimoe. [What churches shall I proclaim for?—I say in my imagination—for I thought that what I saw was a vision]. In this case, the construction indicated in italics (cf. the parenthetical insertion in modern Russian) closely corresponds to the Greek text. The second most common metatextual operator is the metatextual brace, which introduces quotations and exegeses. This type of metatextual operator is associated with the text’s layout and flow (Shaimiev 1996, 80–92). In this word group an important role is played by relativization (such as ezhe to [that is]) introducing exegeses in a special group of pre-Mongolian exegesis translations, particularly, in the earliest translations of the Explanatory Gospel (i.e., Gospel with commentaries) and the Explanatory Acts and Epistles of the Apostles, as well as in Nikita Irakliiskyi’s Comments on Gregory the Theologian’s Sixteen Words. This group of translations appeared, as recent studies demonstrate, in the late eleventeenth—early twelfth centuries (Pentkovskaya et al. 2011; Pichkhadze 2013, 246, 250). Greek originals in such cases contain the

40  Tatiana Pentkovskaya and Anastasia Urzha article to in the neuter form performing the function of inverted commas and signaling the shift from the author’s narration to someone else’s words. The article may, however, not be translated, or may be rendered as ezhe or se [that is]. It can be seen, for instance, in Nikita Irakliiskyi’s Comments: Bezsmertie skazhet, ezh(e) to porazisha. Dobro bo tako razoriti, da ne umrem. [The word “had beaten” tells us about immortality: it is a good idea indeed to strike so that we shall not die] (Pichkhadze 2013, 250). The same function in Greek texts can be performed by explanatory particles and expressions such as dēladē [obviously, certainly, it stands to reason], toutesti [in such a manner, that is], ētoi [like this, that is]. In Old Church Slavonic translations, they can be rendered by various lexemes, the use of which which allows one to split these translations, made in Kievan Rus’, up into groups depending on the choice of the translator. Particles play a key role in the system of metatextual operators in modern Russian. The particles capable of fulfilling metatextual functions in the modern Russian language include such words as bukval’no [literally], budto (by) [allegedly], kak by [as it were], to est’ [that is], imenno [in particular], sobstvenno [as a matter of fact], voobshche [generally], de (indicates attribution of the utterance to another speaker), deskat’ (indicates reported speech), mol (contracted form of [they said]), and iakoby [ostensibly] (Loseva 2004). Yet in the earliest translated texts, the particles performing these metatextual functions are relatively few. Nevertheless, in Old Russian “the carrying out of metatextual functions by particles depends directly on their context” (Loseva 2004), as it does in modern Russian. In East Slavic pre-Mongolian translations, such a role may be assigned to the particle ti. The particle is originally related to the second person pronoun ti [you] in the function of Dativus ethicus, which indicates the action in favor of someone (Fasmer IV, 54–55; Moldovan 1996, 258). Its appearance in the birch bark letters1 and in other Old Russian texts is connected with the semantics of an “indicativity intensifier,” that is, as an indicator of indicativeness (Zalizniak 2004, 196–197). In the initial sentence of the utterance, its meaning can be defined as “I attract your attention to the following fact” or “truly.” Usually there is no literal translation into modern languages of this ti (Moldovan 1996, 258). Generally associated with non-bookish (living) usage, the particle ti was avoided in Old Church Slavonic translations. Nevertheless, it is relatively active in the translation of the Life of St. Andrew the Fool made in Novgorod in the early twelfth century, where one can find 17 examples of the free use of the particle, which cannot be traced with any accurate correspondence back to the Greek source text: nedaleche bo ti budet i puschen budeshi i khoditi nachneshi po svoei voli kdězhe budet godě ochima tvoima—ou makran gar kai

Metatext Verbalization 41 apoluthēsē tō idiō thelēmati poreuestē hopou d’an tois ofthalmois sou estin euareston (Moldovan 1996, 258). [The day is not far indeed when you will be released and will walk on your own, where it will please your eyes]. In individual (isolated) cases, it is used in the Life of St. Basil the Younger: vnimai ubo iako sikh radi brani slut ti sę po stranam—prosches oun hoti dia tauta hoi polemioi stellontai en tais chōrais. [Keep in mind that because of that, war is sent indeed to the country]. In a bound usage (that is, in connection with other words), the particle can also be found in early South Slavic translations (Suprasl’skii Sbornik, Sviatoslav’s Izbornik of 1073, and others) (Moldovan 1996, 260). If the particle ti is not part of the first sentence, it can assign some additional shades of meaning to the utterance (Moldovan 1996, 258). In the following context from the Life of St. Basil the Younger, the meaning of this particle is very close to the meaning of the particle ved’ [indeed]: I priimashe mę liubezně radovashesę m(i)l(o)stně gl(agola)she: Kto tę sěmo prisla, sladkoe moe chado, i pache ot mira sego k nevechernemu dni semu tsi uzhe prestavilsę esi iako sěmo pride? Rekokh k hei: g(ospo)zhe moę, az ti ne umrokh i esche molitvami prepodobnago ottsa nashego Vasilia v mire sem prebyvaiu—Fēmi pros autēn: Kyria mou ammas, egō ouk eteleutēsa. Akmēn gar dia tōn timiōn euchōn tou hosiou patros hēmōn en tō kosmō peripoleuō. [And she received me kindly, and rejoiced, and asked: Who sent you here, my sweet child? Are you already dead, if you come here? And I answered: My lady, I’m not dead indeed, I’m still in this world, thanks to the prayers of our venerable father Basil]. In the Greek text, there is no correspondence to the mentioned particle. It is noteworthy that in the birch bark letters, the particle in free usage is mostly observed in texts from the eleventh to twelfth centuries; later on it forms part of other units such as netut’, dat’ and others (Zalizniak 2004, 197). Therefore, if we find in the translation a particle ti not in combination with other particles, it means that the translation was made before the thirteenth century. As mentioned earlier, the use of the metatextual particle ti in translated texts is almost never supported by the Greek original, it is almost always an addition on the translator’s part. The opposite case, however, is observed, when during the translation a metatextual particle of the Greek original is not rendered by the translator. This is the particle dēthen [as though indeed] (when something alleged is professed), [apparently], or [ostensibly], referring, according to modern classification, to the socalled xenoindicators, or epistemic words (cf. the particles de, deskat’, mol, iakoby, which convey the meaning of subjective modality). This

42  Tatiana Pentkovskaya and Anastasia Urzha particle in the earliest translation of the Life of St. Basil the Younger is rendered by the adverb zlě, literally [badly, severely, hard]: Samona zhe razuměv koeę radi vimy takovaę prepodobnyi reche posramisę ot predstoęschikh, jako zlě khulivshu ego, razgoresę ęrostiu i gněvom—Ho de Samōnas, gnous to di’ ēn aitian autō ta toiauta ho hosios eirēkei, aischuntheis kai dia tous parestēkotas, ōs dēthen enubrisen auton, ekkautheis tō thumō kai tē mēnei. [Samonas understood why reverend father said so and having put on a semblance of anger, he started scolding him]. The same kind of translation can also be traced out in a particular group of exegesis translations, the performance of which is connected with Kievan Rus’: the Explanatory New Testament and Comments on the Song of Songs, the latter being known in Rus’ already in the second half of the twelfth century (Pichkhadze 2013, 251). The function of xenoindicators consists basically in “being disassociated from naming.” According to Wierzbicka, these are the expressions with the help of which the speaker disassociates him/herself from the words being uttered. The speaker stresses that s/he is not the author of the information proferred. Sentences with Russian particles of the type iakoby, vrode by, kak budto by [supposedly] have the following deep structure: • “You should know that S is Р.” • “Don’t think that it’s I who tell you that” (Vezhbitskaia 1978, 408). Simultaneously, some doubt as to the authenticity of the rendered information is expressed. Occurrence of xenoindicators in the texts is connected with the expression of the category of evidentiality; the category being consistently expressed leads to grammaticalization of the metatextual sense. In Russian, unlike Bulgarian, this category has not been grammatically developed, but in Old Russian texts one comes across relict forms of participial predication used to render someone else’s speech or thought. See, for instance, in the Old Russian translation of Pchela [The Bee], that is the translation of the Byzantine collection of sayings on certain subjects: vsę iazhe khoscheshi tako tvori, iako mnę, iako ni ot kogozhe moga utaiti— hapanta dokei poiein ōs mēdena lēsōn [Everything you want to do, do it as if thinking that you cannot keep it a secret (from anybody)] (Pichkhadze 2011, 477–478). Summarizing, it should be noted that in Russian pre-Mongolian translations one can isolate units that belong to various discursive levels and that add metatextual senses to the specific utterance and to the text as a whole. These are, first of all, braces and various particles. But one also comes across participial predications in the relict for the Old Russian function of expressing evidentiality. As a rule, their occurrence is connected with the task of rendering functionally analogous units of Greek texts in the translation. However, in the translations it is possible to find a metatextual particle, the use of which does not correspond to the Greek

Metatext Verbalization 43 originals (the particle ti). This “indicativity intensifier” is connected with the plane of the real (indicative) modality, which later in the Russian northwest dialects is rendered by other means, specifically, by particles traced to the existential verb and having so-called assurance status, that is, status of witnessing, for example, es’ < est’—[am/is/are]: Vse deshevoe bylo est’ [Everything was cheap indeed] (Sheveleva 2001, 211–215).

Metatext in Modern Translations While the early contexts reveal few cases of translator initiative, modern translations display a variety of techniques for interpreting the original. The verbalization of metatextual operators here reflects, first and foremost, each translator’s individual interpretation of the author’s ideas and style. Of course, the choice of metatextual operators in these narratives depends on the genre of the text and the target audience of each translation. But in all texts we can observe interrelations between metatext, time, and modality influencing the image of the speaker and of the addressee. These interrelations change when metatextual operators are omitted or added in translation. Here are some examples found in Russian translations of modern English and American narratives. Elimination of metatextual operators in literary translations is widespread. Moreover, in all studied cases, this omission was not caused by the “untranslatability” of individual English words. The phenomenon arises from the nature of these “heterogeneous” threads, the most prominent function of which is distinguishing the narrator, the addressee, and the code of the speech act. The phrases do not change the plot of a text, so they are perceived as something additional, secondary—and some translators on occasion drop them (see Table 2.1). Comparing fragments of Russian translations of C. S. Lewis’ tales, we see that the elimination of a metatextual operator weakens the contact Table 2.1  Metatextual operators in C.S. Lewis’s The Magician’s Nephew So he went into the dining-room and “glued his face,” as they say, to the window. C. Lewis “The Magician’s Nephew” The metatextual operator is translated: Digori vernulsia v stolovuiu i, kak govoritsia, prilip litsom k oknu. (L’uis 2004; trans. by D. Afinogenov) Back translation: Digori came back into the dining-room and, as it is said, glued his face to the window. The metatextual operator is dropped: Digori poshël v peredniuiu i prizhalsia nosom k okoshku. (L’iuis 1992; trans. by N. Trauberg) Back translation: Digori went into the anteroom and pressed his nose to the window.

44  Tatiana Pentkovskaya and Anastasia Urzha with the reader, erasing the “voice” of the narrator from the text. It also influences the temporal organization of the narrative, removing the time frame constructed by the author and obliterating the sense of retrospection created in the given passage (Urzha 2009). In some cases of thirdperson narrative, the translation that omits metatext lowers the degree of irony or other emotions expressed by the narrator. For example, in early Russian translations of Oscar Wilde’s tales, a lot of expressions like “indeed,” “by the way,” and “of course” are dropped—and, as a result, the ironic narratives become more impersonal and objective than the original. Omission of the narrator’s remarks in Russian translations of Jerome K. Jerome’s novels and O. Henry’s stories distorts the specific humorous storytelling manner of these authors. In some texts we can observe the opposite phenomenon, where translators insert metatextual operators not used in the original (see Table 2.2). In the first-person narrative “MS. Found in a Bottle” by Edgar Allan Poe, the insertion of the metatextual comment in the second translation adds a time frame, creating a retrospective point of view, which does not exist in the original text (the hero doesn’t know if he will survive to the end of his journey). Similar instances can be found in Russian translations of fantastic stories by H. G. Wells and Ray Bradbury. Even small insertions of metatext change the subjectivity and the modality of a text. By adding a metatextual operator, the translator expresses his own vision of the narrator’s activity in a particular case. Both omission and insertion of metatextual operators are common in modern translations, and in many cases these changes are not done with any regularity. Sometimes it even seems that they are not consciously done. Explicitating the activity of the narrator in one fragment and omitting it from another, translators may feel that the metalingual information is compensated for elsewhere (which is not always the case if the metatextual comments serve to organize the perspective of the narration). There can be no doubt that metatextual operators are an important part of the original author’s style. In each text, they create special relations Table 2.2  Metatextual operators in Edgar Allan Poe’s “MS. Found in a Bottle” I went below—not without a full presentiment of evil. E. Poe “Ms. Found in a Bottle” No metatextual operator, as in the original: Ia spustilsia v kaiutu ne bez durnykh predchuvstviĭ. (Trans. by M. Engel’gardt) Back translation: I went down to the cabin not without bad presentiments. The metatextual operator is inserted in the translation: Ia soshel vniz, i, dolzhen skazat’, v dushe u menia bylo polnoe predchuvstvie bedy (Trans. by K. Bal’mont). Back translation: I went below, and, I must say, in my soul was full presentiment of evil.

Metatext Verbalization 45 between the narrator and the addressee. For example, such markers in the tales by P. Travers or C. S. Lewis are sometimes used to appeal to the child reader, and translations highlight this in varying degrees (using more or less bookish words, and employing “you” as ty (intimate “thee”) or vy (polite “you”) in phrases like “as you may guess,” “as you may think”). In the philosophical and sometimes humorous tales and novels of Oscar Wilde, O. Henry, Mark Twain, and Jerome K. Jerome, metatextual operators display the irony of the narrator, which is not rendered in translations when such words as “indeed” or “of course” are omitted. Mysterious events described in the tales and stories by Edgar Allan Poe, A. Conan Doyle, and H. G. Wells are “commented” on with metatextual words having epistemic meaning, expressing various degrees of certainty, that can also be changed significantly in translation, making the narrator sure of some things he was not at all sure of in the original (for example, when a word like “probably” gets omitted). In the psychological narration by Ray Bradbury and Richard Bach, for example, metatextual operators are employed to create a perspective in the text, and so by omitting or inserting these markers a translator can change the point of view from which the events are seen. In some cases, removing metatext can become a systematic device, a planned strategy on the part of the translator. A prominent example can be found among Russian translations of A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess. The original narration contains special slang invented by the author (see Evans 1971; Oks 2009), who used derivatives from Russian stems, writing them in Latin letters: “rooker” [hand], “von” [stink], and “moloko” [milk]. Sometimes we can find plays on words, such as “horrorshow” [well] (a rendering of the Russian khorosho). An English reader, who does not know Russian, needs some help in guessing the meaning of these words, so the narrator provides short commentaries throughout the text (the novel is also supplied with a small dictionary of the invented slang). The role of this metatext is not only explanatory, but compositional as well. In the original text, there are two temporal zones: the events in the past and the narration in the present—when Alex speaks to the reader, commenting on the realia and the words he uses for them. Alex’s remarks help to construct the time frame of the perilous events—the crimes of Alex’s gang that occurred in the past. They also create distance (and difference) between the images of Alex the hero and Alex the narrator. Here is a typical fragment of the novel containing slang words and metatextual commentaries: The four of us were dressed in the height of fashion, which in those days was a pair of black very tight tights with the old jelly mould, as we called it, fitting on the crotch underneath the tights [. . .], so that I had one in the shape of a spider, Pete had a rooker (a hand, that is), [. . .] and poor old Dim had a very hound-and-horny one of a clown’s

46  Tatiana Pentkovskaya and Anastasia Urzha litso (face, that is). [. . .] Then we wore waisty jackets without lapels but with these very big built-up shoulders (“pletchoes” we called them) [. . .] There were three devotchkas sitting at the counter all together, but there were four of us malchicks and it was usually like one for all and all for one. (Burgess 1962, 1–2) Russian translators2 interpreting the invented slang faced a complicated task: these words had to be different from their surroundings. In other words, they had to look like slang, not like ordinary Russian words. The device of ostranenie, or estrangement—(Shklovskii 1919) had to be employed. Vladimir Boshniak (Berdzhess 1991a) used Latin letters for the slang words, Anatolii Gazov-Ginzberg (Berdzhess 1977) changed the phonetic image of some words, and Evgenii Sinel’shchikov (Berdzhess 1991b) derived slang words from English stems. For example, the word “girls” in the original novel is represented by devotchkas, which V. Boshniak renders as kisy (pussies), A. Gazov-Ginzberg as d’evotshki, translated phonetically back into Cyrillic, and E. Sinel’shchikov as gerly (derived from “girls”). The ways of interpreting metatextual commentaries are also different in the translations. V. Boshniak and A. Gazov-Ginzberg use the same strategy as the author of the original: most of the slang words are supplied with short commentary to help the reader “decode” this special language. The situation described by Alex refers to his past, though his speech refers to the “present” moment and addresses the readers, as in the following example in which slang words are highlighted in italics and metatext in bold. The designation (lat) indicates that the translator spelled the given word(s) in Latin letters: u Pita byl ruker (lat) (ruka, znachit) , a Tem dodumalsia prisobachit’ nechto vovse paskudnoe, vrode kak by klounskii morder (lat) (litso, znachit). (Berdzhess 1991a, 7–8. Transl. by V. Boshniak). [Pit had ruker (a hand, that means) , and Tem fixed something filthy like clown’s morder (face, that means)]. Most of the metatextual expressions relevant to the reader are in the present tense, and the past tense is used in the narration itself: Za stoikoi riadyshkom sideli tri kisy (lat) (devchonki, znachit), no nas, patsanov (lat), bylo chetvero, a u nas ved’ kak—libo odna na vsekh, libo po odnoi kazhdomu. (Berdzhess 1991a, 8. Transl. by V. Boshniak). [At the counter were sitting three kisy (girls, that means), but us, boys, were four, and usually for us it was like this: either one for all or one for everybody.]

Metatext Verbalization 47 The situation is totally different in the third translation. E. Sinel’shchikov for some reason removes all metatext from his version, shifting the narration to the present tense: Okolo stoiki na vrashchaiushchikhsia stul’chiakah sidiat tri gerly, no nas chetvero, a zakon stai surov: van for ol, i vse za odnogo. (Berdzhess 1991b, 14. Transl. by E. Sinel’shchikov) [At the counter on the round stools are sitting three gerly, but there are four of us, and the law of the flock is strict: van for ol, and all for one.] This is a kind of dramatic present that creates an effect called a “you-arethere-illusion”: the time frame is removed and the reader finds him- or herself in the space/time of the awful events of the plot (cf. Björling 2004). The emotional impact of the narration is intensified, so the translator decides to do without the metatext that created a retrospective point of view in Burgess’s novel. This strategy is employed consistently throughout the translated text, with Sinel’shchikov foregrounding the events at the expense of the commentaries. (This deviation can be compared to the insertion of the “indicativity intensifier” ti in Old Russian translations). One should admit that his interpretation is very popular among readers, probably due to the deep impression made by present tense narration, and due to his experiments with English-stem slang. The interpretation of metatext becomes one of the key features distinguishing the various Russian translations of Burgess’s novel.

Conclusion Focusing on similar linguistic objects in the translations made in different epochs, we can observe some common trends above the many differences characterizing each of the texts. In general it can be noted that metatext was during both periods treated less consistently than the parts denoting the events of the fabula. Even in Old Church Slavonic translations of religious texts (appearing in the eleventh to thirteenth centuries in Russia), where the interpreter followed the principle of word-by-word transmission, we can find some metatextual explicitations that direct the addressee’s attention to the narrated facts. The earliest contexts of that kind can be found in dialogues; later they appear in the narration itself. Although the nature of metatext and its functions in a narrative have not changed over time, their use in translated texts has become much more diverse in the modern period. Contemporary translations reveal a variety of techniques for rendering the original metatext. First and foremost, its verbalization reflects the individual interpretation of the author’s ideas and style. Second, the rendering of metatexual operators depends on the genre of the text and the nature of the target audience (e.g., children or

48  Tatiana Pentkovskaya and Anastasia Urzha adults). As a result, the original can be represented by translations that differ greatly according to the number and the kind of metatextual operators used. The use of metatext varies; some translators employ it inconsistently while others employ it more deliberately, as a special device for highlighting the peculiarities of the time/space and modality of the narrative, the emotional impact on the target audience, and the translator’s individual interpretation of the text.

Notes 1 The birch bark letters are writings on pieces of the inner layer of birch bark, which have been found during excavations in the Novgorod region beginning in the early 1950s. 2 The information about Russian translations of the novel is included into References.

References Baker, Mona. 1992 / 2011. In Other Words: A Coursebook on Translation. London and New York: Routledge. Berdzhess, Entoni [Burgess, Anthony]. 1977. Mekhanicheskii apel’sin [A mechanical orange]. Translated by A. Gazov-Ginzberg. Tel’-Aviv: OR-Press Ltd. Berdzhess, Entoni [Burgess, Anthony]. 1991a. Zavodnoi apel’sin [A clockwork orange]. Translated by V. Boshniak. Leningrad: Khudozhestvennaia literatura. Berdzhess, Entoni [Burgess, Anthony]. 1991b. Zavodnoi аpel’sin: Ispoved’ khuligana [A clockwork orange: A confession of a hooligan]. Translated by E. Sinel’shchikov. Iunost’ [Youth] 3: 14–27; 4: 60–83. Björling, Fiona. 2004. “As Time Goes by . . .: Tentative Notes on Present Tense Narration in Contemporary Fiction.” In Telling Forms: 30 Essays in Honour of Peter Alberg Jensen (Stockholm Studies in Russian Literature 37), edited by Karin Grelz and Susanna Witt, 17–36. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International. Burgess, Anthony. 1962. A Сlockwork Orange. London: William Heinemann. Evans, Robert O. 1971. “ ‘Nadsat’: The Argot and Its Implications in Anthony Burgess’ ‘A Clockwork Orange.’ ”Journal of Modern Literature 1 (3): 406–410. Even-Zohar, Itamar. 1990. “Void Pragmatic Connectives.” Polysystem Studies. Special Issue of Poetics Today 11 (1): 219–245. Fleischmann, Suzanne and Marina Yaguello. 2004. “Discourse Markers Across Languages.” In Discourse Across Languages and Cultures, edited by Carol Lynn Moder and Aida Martinovic-Zic, 129–148. Amsterdam-Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Hatim, Basil and Ian Mason. 1997. The Translator as Communicator. London and New York: Routledge. House, Juliane. 1997. Translation Quality Assessment: A Model Revisited. Tübingen: Gunter Narr. Jakobson, Roman. 1960. “Linguistics and Poetics.” In Style in Language, edited by T. Sebeok, 350–377. Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press.

Metatext Verbalization 49 L’iuis, Klaiv Steiplz [Lewis, C. S.]. 2004. “Plemiannik Charodeia” [The magician’s nephew]. In Khroniki Narnii [Chronicles of narnia], translated by D. Afinogenov, 101–200. Moscow: Eksmo-Press. L’iuis, Klaiv Steiplz [Lewis, C. S.]. 1992. “Plemiannik Charodeia” [The magician’s nephew]. In Khroniki Narnii [Chronicles of narnia], translated by N. Trauberg, 5–116. Moscow: Gendalf Met. Lewis, C. S. 1988. The Magician’s Nephew. New York: Scholastic Incorporated. Loseva, Svetlana V. 2004. Chastitsy v sisteme metatekstovykh operatorov. Referat na soiskanie uchenoi stepeni kandidata filologicheskikh nauk [Particles in the system of metatextual operators: Summary of a dissertation for the academic degree of candidate of philology]. Vladivostok. Maks, Fasmer [Vasmer, Max]. 1996. Etimologicheskii slovar’ russkogo iazyka [Etymological dictionary of the Russian language] I—IV. St. Petersburg: Terra. Moldovan, Aleksandr M. 1996. “Iz sintaksisa drevnerusskogo perevoda Zhitia Andreia Iurodivogo” [From the syntax of the old Russian translation of life of St. Andrew the fool]. In Rusistika: Slavistika: Indoevropeistika: sbornik k 60-letiiu Andreia A. Zalizniaka [Russian studies: Slavic studies: Indo-European linguistics: Papers presented to the 60th anniversary of A. A. Zalizniak], edited by Aleksei A. Gippius, Tatiana N. Nikolaeva and Vladimir N. Toporov, 256– 275. Moscow: Indrik. Munday, Jeremy. 2012. Evaluation in Translation: Critical Points of Translator Decision-Making. London and New York: Routledge. Oks, Marina. 2009. “The Rebus of ‘Nadsat,’ or a Key To ‘A Clockwork Orange.’ ” In Textual Intricacies: Essays on Structure and Intertextuality in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Fiction in English, edited by Christiane Bimberg, 37–56. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier. Pentkovskaya, Tatiana V., Artem A. Indychenko and Ekaterina V. Fedorova. 2011. “K izucheniu tolkovoi traditsii domongol’skogo perioda: Apostol i Evangelie s tolkovaniiami” [Towards the study of the explanatory tradition of the pre-mongol period: The apostle and the gospel with commentaries]. In Lingvisticheskoe istochnikovedenie i istoriia russkogo iazyka , 30–51. [Linguistic source study and history of the Russian language]. Moscow: Drevlekhranilishche. Pichkhadze, Anna A. 2011. “Slavianskoe prichastie-skazuemoe v zavisimykh predikatsiiakh kak pokazatel’ modal’nosti i evidentsial’nosti” [Slavic participle in the dependent predication as an indicator of modality and evidentiality]. In Bibleistika: Slavistika: Rusistika: K 70-letiiu Anatoliia A. Alekseeva [Biblical studies: Slavic studies: Russian studies: Papers presented to the 70th anniversary of Anatolii A. Alekseev], 462–480. St. Petersburg: Sankt-Peterburgskii universitet. Pichkhadze, Anna A. 2013. “Lingvisticheskie osobennosti slavianskikh tolkovykh perevodov XI–XII veka” [Linguistic features of the slavic explanatory translations of the XI–XII centuries]. In Pis’mennost’, literatura, fol’klor slavianskikh narodov: Istoriia slavistiki: XV Mezhdunarodnyi s’ezd slavistov: Doklady rossiiskoi delegatsii [XV International congress of slavists: Writing, literature, and folklore of the slavic peoples: The history of slavic studies: Reports of the Russian dwelegation], edited by Aleksandr M. Moldovan, 246–265. Moscow: Drevlekhranilishche.

50  Tatiana Pentkovskaya and Anastasia Urzha Po, Edgar A. [Poe, Edgar A.]. 1896. “Rukopis’, naidennaia v butylke” [МS. found in a bottle]. Translated by M. Engel’gardt. In Sobranie sochinenii Edgara Po [Collected works by Edgar Poe] I, edited by Fedor I. Bulgakov, 104–113. St. Petersburg: Tipografiia Brat’ev Panteleevykh. Po, Edgar A. [Poe, Edgar A.]. 1911. “Manuskript, naidennyi v butylke” [МS. Found in a Bottle]. Translated by K. Bal’mont. In Sobranie sochinenii Edgara Po [Collected works by Edgar Poe] III, edited by Jurgis K. Baltrushaitis, 67–81. Moscow: Skorpion. Poe, Edgar A. 1965. “МS. Found in a Bottle.” In The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, Vol. II, 1–15, edited by James A. Harrison. New York: Amsterdam Press Inc. Shaimiev, V. A. 1996. “Kompozitsionno- sintaksicheskie aspekty funktsionirovaniia metateksta v tekste (na materiale lingvisticheskikh tekstov)” [Compositional and syntactic aspects of functioning of the metatext in the text (Based on linguistic texts)]. Russkii tekst: rossiisko-amerikanskii zhurnal po russkoi filologii [Russian Text: Russian—American Journal of Russian Philology] 4: 80–92. Sheveleva, Maria N. 2001. “Ob utrate drevnerusskogo perfekta i proiskhozhdenii dialektnykh konstruktsii so slovom est’ ” [The loss of the perfect tense in old Russian and the origin of dialectal constructions with the word EST’]. In Iazykovaia sistema i ee razvitie vo vremeni i prostranstve: sbornik nauchnykh statei k 80-letiiu professor Klavdii V. Gorshkovoi [Language system and Its development in time and space: papers presented to the 80th anniversary of professor K. V. Gorshkova], edited by Marina L. Remniova, 199–216. Moscow: Moscow State University. Shklovskii, Viktor. 1919. “Iskusstvo kak priëm” [Art as device]. Poetiкa Petrograd: 191–214. Urzha, Anastasia. 2009. Russkii perevodnoi khudozhestvennui tekst s pozitsii kommunikativnoi grammatiki [Russian literary translation as the object of communicative grammar]. Moscow: Sputnik. Vezhbitskaia, Anna [Wierzbicka, Anna]. 1978. “Metatekst v tekste” [Metatext in the text]. In Novoe v zarubezhnoi lingvistike [New in foreign linguistics] VIII, Lingvistika teksta, 402–421. Moscow: Progress. Zalizniak, Andrei A. 2004. Drevnenovgorodskii dialect [Old novgorod dialect]. Moscow: Iazyki slavianskoi kul’tury.

3 “The Mother of All the Sciences and Arts” Academic Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Russia as Cultural Transfer Kåre Johan Mjør In what is arguably one of the most famous stanzas in Russian eighteenthcentury poetry, which appears toward the end of Mikhail Lomonosov’s monumental ode published in 1747 to celebrate the empress Elizabeth’s ascension to the throne, Russia’s youth was encouraged to make bold efforts to show that “the Russian land may give birth to its own Platos and Newtons of quick intellect” (Lomonosov 1986, 120).1 But how should we understand the phrase “own Platos and Newtons?” While the pronoun “own” [sobstvennye] may be read as a critique of slavish imitation and dependence on foreign specialists, of which there were so many in Russia at that time (Tolz 2001, 47), I will argue that the statement is also a defense of cultural transfer. The creation of Russian Platos and Newtons presupposes identification with and appropriation of an imported culture, and Lomonosov emerges here as a firm optimist on behalf of Russia’s capacity for such transfer. Lomonosov’s quest for Russia’s own Platos and Newtons was echoed in a statement attributed to his Ukrainian contemporary Hryhorii Skovoroda, who wanted to become a “Socrates of Rus.” Later, at the turn of the nineteenth century, Mikhail Speranskii likewise hoped that “our Russian church” could bring forth “its own Fénelon”—a French mystic of the late seventeenth century, who in the Russian context was known as the author of Les aventures de Télémaque, following Vasilii Trediakovskii’s 1766 Russian rendition (Tilemakhida). The implication was that philosophy is universal, but must always be accomplished by and in the individual, in specific settings, and is therefore also available to Russians (Goerdt 1984, 186–187). Lomonosov’s vision was not some “indigenous philosophy”—to read him in this way would mean to read the eighteenth century, which in Russia was first and foremost an age of “imitation and apprenticeship” (Hughes 2006, 68), through the prism of Romantic nationalism. Rather, it is a call to participate actively and creatively in the universal quest for knowledge. Whereas Lomonosov’s ode as such is a panegyric celebration of Russia’s imperial achievements thus far, the stanza about Russia’s own Platos and Newtons is written in the future

52  Kåre Johan Mjør tense, expressing the hope that Russia and Russians will contribute to the further development of science, “here in the world.” Lomonosov seeks to include Russia in the modern scientific culture. The “sciences are useful everywhere,” as he continued in the next stanza. Eighteenth-century Russia wanted to advertise that it “was, or was becoming, a participant in scientific research to be taken seriously in international terms” (Ellis 2010, 292). By implication, Russian self-awareness of that time was founded on active receptivity and contact with other cultures, which Hans Rogger in his classic study on Russian nationalism saw as the defining feature of the Russian eighteenth-century “national consciousness.” “Its search for a national identity,” Rogger writes, “was not a rejection of Europe, it was itself another aspect of the Westernization of Russian society” (Rogger 1960, 277). The encounter with the other may have led to a turn toward the self and criticism of slavish borrowing later on, but in the eighteenth century Russian identity was first and foremost based on what Rogger calls the “we too” argument: the wish to appropriate a culture seen as universal and to engage in cultural transfer. Recently, several scholars of Russian studies have proposed the notions of “transfer” and “adaptation” as a pertinent means for analyzing the Russian empire and its appropriation of imperial practices from other empires. The approach enables, as argued by the editors of the book Imperium inter pares (2010), an analysis of “Russian elite culture as a vivid and creatively productive combination of European and Russian elements,” eliminating thereby the firm opposition between Russia and Europe and opening up instead for the study of entangled histories and their hybrid character (Aust, Vulpius and Miller 2010, 6–10). “Transfer” is indeed a broad concept, applying as it does to knowledge, concepts, ideas, technologies, forms of rule, infrastructure, and institutions, but central to the transfer perspective, as it was formulated first by Michel Espagne and Michael Werner (1985), is the target culture’s productive appropriation of the source culture, from which emerge not only transcultural similarities, but also, and equally important, significant differences between the source and target cultures, differences that emerge from the process of transfer itself. Cultural transfer is not limited to translation in the traditional sense— i.e., to verbal translation of foreign texts, and eighteenth-century Russia is a good illustration of this (Tyulenev 2012, 64). The writing of new texts within the domestic culture and in the domestic language may also be analyzed as an attempt to translate a foreign culture. In order to illustrate this, this chapter zooms in precisely on “Russia’s Platos,” discussing the discipline of philosophy in eighteenth-century Russia as part of the more general transfer of the European university system and university idea into Russia in this period (Andreev and Posokhov 2012). Philosophical texts of the 1750s and 1760s written in Russian are here analyzed as the translation of an academic discipline and culture, the

“The Mother of All the Sciences and Arts” 53 aim of which was to make Russia—a country to which the standards of the “civilized world” were now firmly believed to be applicable (Rogger 1960, 254)—a full participant in the universal process of scientific development. In eighteenth-century Russia, translation and transfer were a means of Westernization and thus of modernization and global integration (Coudenys 2016), a process in which the introduction of European Enlightenment culture was a semiotic translation in the form of knowledge exchange (Tyulenev 2012, 68, 80–81).

Transferring the Enlightenment Imperial Russia, as Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter has argued, “was one of the first societies to meet the challenge of European modernity by self-consciously embracing the Western model of development.” From Peter the Great onward we witness the “frenzied borrowing, primarily for military and administrative purposes, but with a significant cultural dimension due to the need for technology and educated servicemen” (Wirtschafter 2009, 6). What Russia “embraced and borrowed,” or transferred and adapted, was the critical, scientific culture that emerged in the eighteenth century. In this culture, reason, conceived at the time as the ability to scrutinize all things, was grounded in empirical observation and new scientific methods, while at the same time it was believed to apply to all fields (Cassirer 1932). This new age was already at the time described in different languages as the Age of Enlightenment [Le siècle des Lumières, Aufklärung]. The most prominent formulation of this Enlightenment concept of reason, which in retrospect is believed to have summed up the eighteenth century, belongs to Immanuel Kant, who in 1784 defined Enlightenment [Aufklärung] as “man’s release from his self-incurred tutelage,” i.e., from his “inability to make use of his understanding without direction from another” (Kant 1959, 85). For Kant, the stage of Enlightenment represented the culmination of world history. The new Enlightenment culture that emerged in Western Europe, from the Frühaufklärung of Leibniz, who was also Peter the Great’s personal advisor, to the French philosophes, was transferred to Russia fairly simultaneously, if selectively. In Russia, by implication, “Enlightenment” [Prosveshchenie] acquired additional meanings as compared to those of the West European languages. First and foremost, Enlightenment in Russia has also meant, or at least heavily implied, Europeanization or Westernization, a meaning that it, quite logically, did not have in Western Europe (Lehmann-Carli 1994). The establishment of new institutions, in particular in the first half of the eighteenth century, “represented primarily a process of the westernization of cultural forms rather than the influence of specifically enlightened thought” (Madariaga 1998, 265). “Genuine Enlightenment,” Isabel de Madariaga argues, emerged only during the reign of Catherine the Great. In any case, throughout the

54  Kåre Johan Mjør eighteenth century the Enlightenment in the Russian context was a cultural transfer. And as cultural semiotics has taught us, transfers from one culture to another acquire different meanings and functions in the target culture (Uspenskii 1998, 5). One significant difference was that the Russian Enlightenment was initiated from above, by the state. In contrast to West European cultures, it was not the project of intellectuals independent of the state, but a state ideology, which in the Age of Reason would restrict the free unfolding of reason—suffice it to mention the repression of the thinkers Aleksandr Radishchev and Nikolai Novikov under the otherwise “genuine enlightener” Catherine the Great. The transfer of Enlightenment ideas did not weaken Russian autocracy; the aim was just as much to strengthen it—which it did (Zhivov 2002, 439–460). The sciences that were imported from the West from Peter the Great onward had likewise several functions. Peter’s own interest in science appears to have had a utilitarian and instrumental rationale, with the aim of modernizing Russia, not least for military purposes. Later on, the sciences also became a means for Russian identity formation as a “European power,” as Catherine the Great defined it, though this dimension can be seen already in Peter’s own ambitions. The founding of a Russian Academy of Sciences in 1724 represented, in Michael Gordin’s (2000) apt formulation, “the importation of being earnest,” since much emphasis was put already here on manners and etiquette. The importation of science was intended to increase Russia’s international reputation, to represent it as a distinct member of the modern family. Westernization was a civilizing process. This means that the sciences were not only a practical means for modernization, but gained in the Russian context an additional symbolic meaning and cultural capital that they did not have in the West, from where it was imported (Renner 2005, 67). The numerous cultural forms imported to Russia during the eighteenth century also included the Western European university system, which the scholars Andrei Andreev and Sergei Posokhov (2012) have defined precisely as the transfer and adaptation—by the state—of a Western European institution with specific forms of teaching, educational systems, and academic behavior, which were alien to the everyday life of Russian eighteenthcentury society. Andreev and Posokhov oppose the transfer approach to the traditional way in which the history of Russian universities has been written, by pre-revolutionary as well as Marxist historians. According to the traditional view, Russian universities emerged from specific inherent needs of the Russian “soil” [pochva], and represented, correspondingly, the founding of a national tradition. They have, therefore, often been analyzed in isolation from the university system in other countries— from where it was imported. According to Andreev and Posokhov, however, the “secular university” established in Moscow in 1755 was modeled after the reformed protestant universities in Germany (Halle, Göttingen, Marburg).

“The Mother of All the Sciences and Arts” 55 The transfer of the West European university system to Russia involved, moreover, the importation of a utilitarian attitude toward learning and science characteristic of this age. In his classical but also deeply critical history of philosophy in Russia, Gustav Shpet (1922) criticized the Russian attitude toward learning in general and to philosophy more specifically, almost throughout its history, for being permeated by utilitarianism, which in practice led to a neglect of philosophy and science. The Russian reception, Shpet maintained, has been characterized by ignorance. However, the transfer perspective helps us to see that, at least in the eighteenth century, utilitarianism was not a specifically Russian attitude toward knowledge but was characteristic of the Enlightenment as such. (This was before the Humboldtian model of academic freedom and research universities). The main purpose of higher education throughout Europe in the Age of Enlightenment was to prepare students for civil service and provide practical knowledge for the public good (Rüegg 2004, 3).

Philosophy at the University The university that opened in Moscow in 1755 had three faculties: philosophy, law, and medicine. It conformed thereby to the classical European university structure, except that it did not have a faculty of theology— the teaching of theology was restricted to the “spiritual academies” in Kiev and Moscow. One of the four classic faculties from the Middle Ages onward and the site for the “seven liberal arts,” the faculty of philosophy had traditionally been an institution for introductory courses and was, therefore, the lowest ranking faculty. At the same time, philosophy was seen as a discipline that provided the scientific models for the other sciences. Later, in the eighteenth century, it even began to assume the role of a “leading science,” a role that had earlier been played by theology and law. Philosophy would increasingly be understood as a foundational discipline, described in metaphorical terms as the “court of appeal” and the “judge” over the (other) sciences (Schneiders 2006; Schmidt-Biggemann 1996). With the growing specialization of the other sciences, it was often argued (in particular by philosophers themselves) that the role of philosophy was to define the areas of the individual disciplines, the relationship between them, and their common ground, which was the new concept of nature. It established, or so it was assumed, the scientific criteria for the other disciplines. This idea reached Moscow, too, as evident in a report formulated by a university committee in 1768 that stated that philosophy should be compulsory for the students of the other two faculties (medicine and law). In fact, it was recommended not to admit students to “higher studies” without having introduced them to “logic, physics, mathematics and ethics”—i.e., to philosophy (Pavlov 2010, 14). Two surviving texts from the first year of Moscow University testify to the transfer to Russia of the notion of philosophy as a metascience. In

56  Kåre Johan Mjør a speech given at the opening of the university on 26 April 1755, Anton Barsov, who had been given the chair in mathematics, emphasized that while there are as many types of learning and types of science as there are types of things, one of them stands out with particular force, and that is philosophy. The other sciences belong “in a way” [nekotorym obrazom] to philosophy, Barsov argued, “Because philosophy has the power to make judgments [rassuzhdat’] about the causes of all things without exception, that is because it examines the relationship between causes and effects” (Barsov 1952, 107). Philosophy teaches reason how to “know the truth” [poznanie istiny], making it possible, in turn, for us to figure out how to attain the state of “well-being” [blagopoluchie]. Similar ideas were presented in a slightly more elaborate way in a speech given by the rector of Moscow University, Nikolai Popovskii, later that year, in August, which marked the opening of a new series of lectures on philosophy. Popovskii asked his audience to imagine a cathedral where the entire universe, “everything in, on and above the earth” is on display, including the “venerable and unattainable divinity,” as well as the road to happiness. Philosophy, then, is the depiction of this cathedral; philosophy is about “everything under the sun.” By implication, “all knowledge [poznanie] is dependent on it—it is the mother of all the sciences and arts” (Popovskii 1952, 88). And when you master philosophy, you will master also all the other disciplines, since philosophy establishes the main rules for all the other ones, guaranteeing thereby a true perception and understanding of nature. Of course, philosophy does not go into all the points of the individual fields. Rather, the philosopher is just like an architect, who instead of planning all the details of the new construction establishes the rules, order, measures, relationships, and general features. And, like Barsov, Popovskii combines this conception of philosophy as the foundational discipline with a pragmatic justification, stressing its utility [pol’za] for the Russian empire. Philosophy “dictates the general ways and means for human well-being [. . .] for the benefit of the fatherland” (Popovskii 1952, 90). References to “benefit” and “wellbeing” are scattered throughout this text and are, as noted earlier, highly characteristic of eighteenth-century philosophy. The combination of serving the overall purpose of human well-being and providing the foundation for all the other sciences is encountered also in the writings of the philosopher and translator of articles from Diderot’s Encyclopedia Iakov Kozel’skii (1952, 412), to whom I will return next. In 1759, The French encyclopedist Jean de Rond D’Alembert described his own century as the “philosophical age,” a notion that testifies to the privileged position of philosophy in this period. However, eighteenthcentury conceptions were not uniform; there existed at least two competing conceptions of philosophy: the academic, scientific type and the free intellectual one, both of which reached Russia (Artem’eva 2005, 129). The French idea of the free, individual philosopher, as distinguished

“The Mother of All the Sciences and Arts” 57 from the “dry” professional philosopher of academic institutions, was expressed in the anonymous entry for “Le Philosophe” in the Encyclopedia, a text that had first appeared as a pamphlet in 1743 (Krefting and Maurseth 2008, 87). This notion may have had some impact on the nobility under Catherine the Great, on the empress herself, as well as on the intelligentsia that emerged at that time from among the members of nobility, who had been liberated by Catherine from mandatory civil service. Russian academic institutions, however, represented first and foremost the transfer of the German university model. By implication, it was German philosophy that became most influential in Russia, and “German philosophy” here means Leibniz and in particular his younger and more systematic colleague Christian Wolff, who was based in Halle, which became one of the models for the new university in Moscow. Wolff’s metaphysical rationalism, as it is often called, aimed at demonstrating the “power of human reason to attain certainty in the field of metaphysics, including metaphysical knowledge of God” (Copleston 1960, 106). To many, Wolffian philosophy represented a “sound” alternative to other more “atheistic” currents of that time. Popovskii, for one, emphasized philosophy’s ability to provide knowledge of God—by means of reason. In his speech he maintained, as a critique of contemporary “atheists” (French philosophers?), that philosophy is able to demonstrate, without reference to the Bible or the Church Fathers, that nature cannot come into being by itself, but that there has to be a being [sushch­ estvo] that is behind everything that exists [tvar’] (Popovskii 1952, 89). Formulations like these may be what Vladimir Pustarnakov (2001, 185) had in mind when he wrote that Russian philosophers such as Popovskii appropriated those elements of Wolff that did not come into conflict with traditional Orthodox dogmas, while leaving out those that might. Thus, what was transferred to Russia in the eighteenth century was what Jonathan Israel has categorized—in opposition to Israel’s own hero and “radical enlightener” Spinoza—as “western moderate mainstream philosophy, especially Leibniz, Wolff, Bilfinger, Pufendorf, Locke, and Newton,” the overall aim being not societal enlightenment as such but the “enhancement of Russian imperial power” (Israel 2006, 297, 306). Marc Raeff has likewise argued that the philosophy of Leibniz and Wolff, which at first came to Russia “along with technology,” aligned well with the overall aims of the policies initiated by Peter the Great in that they did not challenge Christian dogmas. Their teachings stressed “obligation and duty as the prerequisite of individual rights, in contrast to the ‘possessive individualism’ of the Hobbesian and Lockean tradition” (Raeff 1973, 35). Often remembered today in the West merely as a prelude to Kant, Wolff focused his energies on systematizing the writings of his predecessor Leibniz. The Leibniz/Wolff paradigm became dominant in Russian university philosophy and remained dominant long into the nineteenth

58  Kåre Johan Mjør century. All the textbooks on philosophy used at Moscow University for the remaining part of the eighteenth century and well into the nineteenth were written by German “Wolffians,” such as Friedrich Baumeister and Johann Winckler, whose manuals were translated into Russian. Matvei Begichev’s Russian translation of Wolff’s own so-called German Logic of 1713 appeared in 1765, bearing the title Razumnye mysli o silakh chelovecheskogo razuma i ikh ispravnom upotreblenii v poznanii prirody [Rational thoughts on the power of the human understanding and its sound use for attaining knowledge of nature]. While Wolff is often dismissed as an unoriginal thinker, especially when compared to Leibniz and Kant, to eighteenth-century Russia, which had no tradition of scholastic thinking, Wolff’s philosophy was new, original and relevant for its scientific development (Artem’eva and Mikeshin 1990, 66).

Philosophy as Rassuzhdenie The intellectual historian Alexandre Koyré, who very much shared Shpet’s negative opinion of Russian academic philosophy of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, claimed that Popovskii’s speech contained no concept of philosophy. It was merely a “rhetorical exercise,” and it was therefore no accident that Popovskii soon thereafter abandoned the chair of philosophy for that of rhetoric (Koyré 1929, 66–67). Koyré may have been correct in that there was no substantial discussion of philosophy in his speech and that its tone was impassioned. In my view, still, Koyré’s judgment is somewhat unfair, for when Popovskii says that “everything under the sun is subject to the examination and verdict [of philosophy]” (Popovskii 1952, 88), we hear a clear echo of Wolff’s definition of philosophy as the “science of everything that is possible.” Central to Wolff’s conception of philosophy, more specifically, was its ability to demonstrate propositions, or to infer correct conclusions—i.e., to show all the other disciplines what a scientific judgment should look like, with emphasis on foundations, causes, and correct reasoning. Philosophy as science is therefore method and order for the overall purpose of serving our needs and interests (Corr 1998). As we saw earlier, this idea figured prominently in Russian eighteenth-century philosophical writings. The terms used in Russian eighteenth-century philosophical text to conceptualize the metascientific role of philosophy was the noun rassuzhdenie and the verb rassuzhdat’. Earlier, I gave one example of this from Barsov’s speech, and a similar example can be found in Popovskii’s: Philosophy is the “science that rassuzhdaet about everything” (Popovskii 1952, X). The Slovar’ Akademii Rossiiskoi [Dictionary of the Russian Academy] that was published in the years 1789–1794 defines rassuzhdenie as a deductive comparison of two concepts or things, in order to find similarity or difference. Thus, rassuzhdenie may be translated into English as “deductive reasoning,” with the purpose of reaching a conclusion or

“The Mother of All the Sciences and Arts” 59 judgment. Alternatively, it could also be rendered as “(to make a) judgment.” In philosophical texts, it corresponds to the Latin terms iudicium, ratiocinatio, or discursus, depending on the context. And so, the meaning of rassuzhdenie may be either very specific or quite general, defining either a specific intellectual operation or the general nature of true, reasonable philosophy. The second meaning of rassuzhdenie given by the Dictionary is simply “work” (sochinenie, cf. the French Discourse or Latin Discursus), and rassuzhdenie figures frequently in titles of Russian philosophical and scientific treatises of the eighteenth century. A wellknown example from Russian political history is Petr Shafirov’s 1717 treatise Rassuzhdenie kakie zakonnye prichiny Petr I, tsar’ i poevlitel’ vserossiiskii, k nachatiiu voiny protiv Karla XII, korol’ shvedskogo, v 1700 godu imel [A Discourse concerning the just causes for Peter the First, tsar and sovereign of Russia, in 1700 to start war against Charles XII, king of Sweden]. Barsov and Popovskii’s use of the term rassuzhdenie may have been inspired by the philosopher who is usually described as the Russian Wolffian par excellence: Grigorii Teplov. Having studied in Germany, he worked first at the Academy of Sciences and later became a statesman. In 1751 he published his main philosophical work, Znaniia, kasaiushchiesia voobshche do filosofii, dlia pol’zy tekh, kotorye o sei materii chuzhe­ strannykh knig chitat’ ne mogut [Knowledge about philosophy in general for the benefit of those who cannot read foreign books on this topic] (Teplov 1998). Here, Teplov took over Wolff’s notion of philosophy as being about causes; if it is not about causes, it is not truly philosophical (Artem’eva 2005, 105). Philosophy, as Teplov defined it more specifically, is the discipline that makes it possible to achieve knowledge about unknown things when starting from known ones. Crucial to philosophy is therefore the ability to infer correctly, through “reasoning [rassuzhdenie] and conclusions.” The science of philosophy is a method, and logic is therefore the key to a proper understanding of philosophy. The primary task is to “judge [rassuzhdat’] about what exists and may exist.” Thus, to philosophize is nothing other than “having philosophical knowledge,” i.e., to “make judgements [rassuzhdat’] about causes and so on” (Teplov 1998, 248– 253 [§34–38]). However, Teplov also uses rassuzhdenie in order to refer to his own treatise, though in the plural: “From the discussion [rassuzhdeniia] of philosophy above, one may infer [rassudit’] that . . .” (Teplov 1998, 261 [§47]). At the other end of the spectrum, we find at least one very specific definition of rassuzhdenie in his work, in the paragraph where he discusses the issue of relation [vzaimnost’]. Here, rassuzhdenie is defined as the “word” that one has to “put between concepts that are related to one another”—i.e., that one cannot understand one of them without the other (e.g., “non-being,” “blindness,” “deaf”), “for to rassuzhdat’ means

60  Kåre Johan Mjør nothing else than to arrive at the better answer [mnenie]” (Teplov 1998, 272 [§87]). The impact of the Wolffian conception of philosophy is also clearly present in Iakov Kozel’skii’s work Filosofskie predlozheniia [Philosophical proposals], which was published in 1768. Although it has been argued that Kozel’skii was critical of the many Wolffian textbooks that were used in his time, and while he himself explicitly identified with thinkers like Rousseau, Helvetius, and Montesquieu (Walicki 1979, 8–10), Kozel’skii, too, defined philosophy as a metascience capable of demonstrating how to obtain true knowledge, and more specifically as the “experience of causes of truths” (Kozel’skii 1952, 427). As was common in philosophical texts of this period, Kozel’skii distinguished between theoretical and practical philosophy, dividing theoretical philosophy into metaphysics and logic. Logic, then, consists of the “three abilities of the human soul: feeling, judgement [rassuzhdenie] and reflection [umstvovanie].” For the latter two, which are those that interest us here, Kozel’skii provides the corresponding Latin terms: iudicium and ratiocinatio. “Judgment” is defined quite narrowly as the capacity of combining subject and predicates in a sentence, while “reflection” is the ability to infer a “third proposition” from two present ones, something that the author exemplifies by means of a classical syllogism. Thus, there can be no doubt that Kozel’skii’s concept of “judgment” [rassuzhdenie] here is far narrower than those encountered in the texts by Barsov, Popovskii, and Teplov, and that even “reflection” [umstvovanie] as defined by Kozel’skii is merely part of the far broader notion of rassuzhdenie of Barsov, Popovskii, and Teplov. However, also Kozel’skii conceives of his own philosophical treatise as rassuzhdenie. In the introduction, for example, he describes his work as a “discussion of the sciences” [Ia, rassuzhdaia po naukam, . . .] (Kozel’skii 1952, 416). Thus, rassuzhdenie, I would argue, is the pivotal metaconcept in the philosophical discourse that emerged in Russia in the eighteenth century. It may describe what constitutes proper philosophical activity as such, but it also can refer to quite specific mental operations. Although the widespread use of one concept for overlapping activities and tasks may be seen as a weakness and a lack of precision, it represents a firm embodiment of the new, imported belief in the power of human reason. In these examples, we see that cultural transfer stimulates the creation of “abstract word-formation patterns and complex syntactic structures for scientific or literary discourse” (Tyulenev 2012, 84).

Creating Russia’s Own Platos A large part of Popovskii’s 1755 speech was an engaged defense for the use of the Russian language instead of Latin in philosophy. Having defined philosophy as the “mother” of the other sciences, Popovskii

“The Mother of All the Sciences and Arts” 61 lamented that while “its children” now speak in different languages, their mother has still not learned any languages other than Latin. However, the science that makes judgments about everything that exists cannot be satisfied by speaking Latin alone—this will only make it less useful. And just as the Romans translated Greek terms, so Russians can translate Latin terms into Russian, so that every Russian can take part in the benefits of philosophy. We may read Popovskii’s defense of the use of Russian in philosophical texts as a response to Lomonosov’s quest for Russia’s own Platos, as referred to in the beginning of this chapter. To create “indigenous Platos” in the mid-eighteenth century did not mean so much a preoccupation with specific “indigenous” themes—as it would in discussions about Russian philosophy later in the nineteenth century—as to participate by means of its own language. Popovskii himself translated Alexander Pope’s “Essay on Man” and educational texts by John Locke, and he firmly believed that Russia was about to enter the family of enlightened peoples. Although it was among the later ones to do this, he emphasized that lateness did not mean intellectual weakness. Popovskii’s program resonated with the general trends of his age: the eighteenth century was the age in which philosophy was linguistically nationalized and Latin was gradually replaced by French, English, and German (Schneiders 2006). Russia too contributed to this development, though Latin continued to be used in academic philosophy until the early nineteenth century. One reason for this was the large number of nonRussian scholars working in Russian academic institutions. However, given the increasing number of translated manuals, philosophy in Russia must have had a bilingual character in this period. The first “native Russian” professor of philosophy in Moscow, who was also a translator, Dmitrii Anichkov, produced his doctoral thesis, Rassuzhdenie iz natural’noi bogoslovii o nachale i proisshestvii natural’nogo bogopochitaniia [Discourse of Natural Theology on the Origin and History of Natural Religion] (1769), in both Russian and Latin. And as we have seen in this chapter, Russians did indeed produce philosophical texts in their own language. The philosophical discipline that was transferred to Russia in the eighteenth century was inevitably eclectic. However, eclecticism is characteristic of rapid knowledge transfers of this kind and does not necessarily imply any philosophical deficiencies of Russian academics of that period. Another result of this cultural transfer was that the metaphilosophical discussions of philosophy as analyzed always bore the character of being also introductions to a yet unknown topic. The justification of philosophy against skepticism occupies a prominent place in Russian eighteenth-century philosophical texts and would continue to do so in Russia throughout the nineteenth century (Mjør 2014). It has therefore been argued that philosophy, as a “foreign product recently imported

62  Kåre Johan Mjør into the country” has “never been looked at kindly in Russia” (Koyré 1929, 113). The observation that philosophy was imported is correct, but in the period discussed here Wolffian philosophy appears to have been well received by many. It cannot be denied, however, that this transfer introduced Russia to a rapidly and dynamically evolving process, in which Wolff’s metaphysics would soon be succeeded by Kant, who denied that metaphysics as a science was possible. In contrast to Wolff, Kantianism would prove to be highly problematic for the Russian authorities. In 1795, the German professor Johan Melmann was expelled from Russia for his allegedly “atheistic Kantianism,” and he would be followed by others in the early nineteenth century, in what Koyré has called the “struggle against philosophy” in Russia. At the same time, the attitude toward Kantianism was not unequivocal: A Russian translation of the Kantian Friedrich Snell’s textbook appeared in 1813–14. The Leibniz/Wolff paradigm persisted longer in Russia than in Germany, something that has contributed to the impression of Russian academic philosophy as increasingly anachronistic. This, together with the frequent repression of subsequent currents, has given it a reputation for being servile, imitative, and boring. We should not forget, though, that in 1755 philosophy represented both a means for the modernization of Russia and a field in which Russians could, or so they hoped, excel. And in the eighteenth century, moreover, genuine achievements in art, science and thought were unthinkable without imitation, an idea most famously formulated by Johann Joachim Winckelmann, who in the 1750s stressed the importance of imitating the Ancient Greek models in order to be significant at present (Winckelmann 1969, 2).

Note 1 All translations in this chapter are mine, KJM, if not otherwise indicated.

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“The Mother of All the Sciences and Arts” 63 Barsov, Anton. 1952. “Rech’ o pol’ze uchrezhdeniia imperatorskogo Moskovskogo universiteta pri otkrytii onogo 1755 goda aprelia 26 dnia” [Speech on the benefit of establishing the imperial Moscow university, on the occasion of its opening on 26 April 1755]. In Izbrannye proizvedeniia russkikh myslitelei vtoroi poloviny XVIII veka [Selected works of Russian thinkers of the second half of the eighteenth century], edited by Ivan Shchipanov, 105–107. Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literatury. [hereafter IPRM]. Cassirer, Ernst. 1932. Die Philosophie der Aufklärung. Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr Verlag. Copleston, S. J. Frederick. 1960. A History of Philosophy, Vol. 6: From the French Enlightenment to Kant. New York: Doubleday. Corr, Charles A. 1998. “Wolff, Christian.” In Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward Craig, www.rep.routledge.com/article/DB070SECT3. London: Routledge. Coudenys, Wim. 2016. “Translation and the Emergence of History as an Academic Discipline in 18th-Century Russia.” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 17 (4): 721–752. Ellis, Charles. 2010. “Natural Science.” In A History of Russian Thought, edited by William Leatherbarrow and Derek Offord, 286–307. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Espagne, Michel and Michael Werner. 1985. “Deutsch-französischer Kulturtransfer im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert.” Francia 13: 502–510. Goerdt, Wilhelm. 1984. Russische Philosophie: Zugänge und Durchblicke. Freiburg: Alber. Gordin, Michael D. 2000. “The Importation of Being Earnest: The Early St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences.” Isis 91 (1): 1–31. Hughes, Lindsey. 2006. “Russian Culture in the Eighteenth Century.” In The Cambridge History of Russia, Vol. 2: Imperial Russia, 1689–1917, edited by Dominic Lieven, 67–91. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Israel, Jonathan. 2006. Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man, 1670–1752. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kant, Immanuel. 1959. Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals and What Is Enlightenment. Translated and edited by Lewis White Beck. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill. Koyré, Alexandre. 1929. La philosophie et le problème national en russie au début du XIXe siècle. Paris: Gallimard. Kozel’skii, Iakov. 1952. “Filosofskie predlozheniia” [Philosophical proposals]. In IPRM, 411–551. Krefting, Ellen and Anne Beate Maurseth. 2008. Mennesket: Arven fra opplysningstiden [The human being: The legacy of the enlightement]. Oslo: Scandinavian Academic Press. Lehmann-Carli, Gabriela. 1994. “Aufklärungsrezeption, ‘prosveščenie’ und ‘Euro­ päisierung’: Die Spezifik der Aufklärung in Ruβland (II).” Zeitschrift für Slawistik 39 (3): 358–382. Lomonosov, Mikhail. 1986. Izbrannye proizvedeniia [Selected works]. Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel’. Madariaga, Isabel de. 1998. Politics and Culture in Eighteenth-Century Russia. London and New York: Longman. Mjør, Kåre Johan. 2014. “Philosophy, Modernity and National Identity: The Quest for a Russian Philosophy at the Turn of the Twentieth Century,” Slavonic and East European Review 92 (4): 622–652.

64  Kåre Johan Mjør Pavlov, Aleksei. 2010. Filosofiia v Moskovskom universitete [Philosophy at Moscow university]. St. Petersburg: RKhGA. Popovskii, Nikolai. 1952. “Rech’, govorennaia v nachatii filosoficheskikh lektsii pri Moskovskom universitete gimnazii” [Speech held at the opening of the Philosophical Lectures at the Moscow University Gymnasium]. In IPRM, 87–92. Pustarnakov, Vladimir. 2001. “Filosofiia Vol’fa i ‘russkaia vol’fiana’ v otechestvennoi istoriografii” [Wolff’s philosophy and the “Russian Wolffian” in our historiography]. In Khristian Vol’f i filosofiia v Rossii [Christian Wolff and Philosophy in Russia], edited by V. A. Zhuchkov, 124–188. St Petersburg: RKhGI. Raeff, Marc. 1973. “The Enlightenment in Russia and Russian Thought in the Enlightenment.” In The Eighteenth Century in Russia, edited by John Garrard, 25–47. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Renner, Andreas. 2005. “Wissenschaftstransfer ins Zarenreich des 18. Jahrhunderts: Bemerkungen zum Forschungsstand am Beispiel der Medizingeschichte.” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 53: 64–85. Rogger, Hans. 1960. National Consciousness in Eighteenth-Century Russia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rüegg, Walter. 2004. “Themes.” In A History of the University in Europe, Vol. 3: Universities in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (1800–1945), edited by Walter Rüegg, 3–31. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schmidt-Biggemann, Wilhelm. 1996. “New Structures of Knowledge.” In A History of the University in Europe, Vol. 2: Universities in Early Modern Europe (1500–1800), edited by Hilde de Ridder-Symoens, 489–530. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schneiders, Werner. 2006. “Conceptions of Philosophy.” In The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Philosophy, Vol. 2, edited by Knut Haakonssen, 26–44. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shpet, Gustav. 1922. Ocherki razvitiia russkoi filosofii [Outline of the development of Russian philosophy]. Petrograd: Kolos. Slovar Akademii Rossiiskoi [Dictionary of the Russian academy]. 1789–1794. St. Petersburg: Imperatorskaia Akademiia Nauk. Teplov, Georgii. 1998. “Znaniia, kasaiushchiesia voobshche do filosofii, dlia pol’zy tekh, kotorye o sei materii chuzhestrannykh knig chitat’ ne mogut” [Knowledge about philosophy in general for the benefit of those who cannot read foreign books on this topic]. In Filosofskii vek: Almanakh, Vol. 3: Khristian Vol’f i russkoe vol’fianstvo [The philosophical age, Vol. 3: Christian wolff and Russian wolffianism], edited by Tat’iana Artem’eva and Mikhail Mikeshin, 207–289. St Petersburg: RAN. Tolz, Vera. 2001. Russia. London: Arnold. Tyulenev, Sergey. 2012. Translation and the Westernization of Eighteenth-Century Russia: A Social-Systemic Perspective. Berlin: Frank & Timme. Uspenskii, Boris. 1998. Tsar’ i patriarkh: Kharizma vlasti v Rossii (Vizantiiskaia model’ i ee russkoe pereosmyslenie) [Tsar and patriarch: The charisma of power in Russia (The Byzantine Model and Its Russian Reinterpretation)]. Moscow: Iazyki russkoi kul’tury. Walicki, Andrzej. 1979. A History of Russian Thought: From the Enlightenment to Marxism. Translated by Hilda Andrews-Rusiecka. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Winckelmann, Johann Joachim. 1969. Werke in einem Band. Berlin: AufbauVerlag.

“The Mother of All the Sciences and Arts” 65 Wirtschafter, Elise Kimerling. 2009. “Thoughts on the Enlightenment and Enlightenment in Russia.” Journal of Modern Russian History and Historiography 2: 1–26. Zhivov, Viktor. 2002. Razyskaniia v oblasti istorii i predystorii russkoi kul’tury [Research in the history and prehistory of Russian culture]. Moscow: Iazyki russkoi kul’tury.

4 Translation as Appropriation The Russian Operatic Repertoire in the Eighteenth Century Anna Giust

Generally speaking, before the evolution of original literary production in Russia, the main European literary models came to the country through the practice of translation. This became a means of acquisition, dissemination, and appropriation of foreign repertoires. Early translations (peredelki—remakes) were characterized by a degree of freedom on the translator’s part to introduce new elements or changes. In the late eighteenth century, the practice of remaking with sklonenie na russkie nravy (adaptations to Russian customs) aimed at facilitating comprehension of the foreign works by the target audience, since the translators were conscious of the different cultural ground on which their work would be received. This process affected operatic texts too, which will be the focus of this chapter. This specific field has yet to be fully explored within translation studies, in particular, the influence exerted by the translation of operatic texts on the formation of such national genres as Russian comic opera. This chapter models an approach to operatic translations that would connect the study of translation to the study of Russian musical theater, the evolution of which has much in common with that of Russian literature and giving updated information of the titles represented in translation in the main Russian theaters of this age, it demonstrates how the practice of translation gradually encouraged the creation of the original genre of opera komicheskaia [comic opera]. The perception of the history of Russian opera has been greatly influenced by the judgment of nineteenth-century critics, notably those, such as Vladimir Stasov, who strove to highlight the autonomy of Russian works from European models. However, the creation of an original repertoire necessarily involved a process of transformation of pre-existing materials, insofar as opera had been created outside the Russian empire, where it was introduced only at an advanced stage of its evolution. The appropriation of European operatic models went through several stages that manifested themselves not always in a linear evolution (chronologically speaking), but which will be discussed in logical order. The first is the staging of foreign operas—mainly Italian, but also German and French—in Moscow and Saint Petersburg, starting, after episodical

Translation as Appropriation 67 beginnings in related genres in the previous century (cf. e.g. Jensen and Maier 2013), from Calandro by Giovanni Alberto Ristori. This intermezzo was staged in Moscow in 1731 by the first Italian court troupe hired in Dresden by the Russian court (Ferrazzi 2000; Gozenpud 1959; Keldysh 1984). Subsequently, the production in loco of operas by foreign poets and composers such as La clemenza di Tito [Titus’s clemency] was launched. Based on a libretto by Metastasio, the opera was staged with music by Johann Adolf Hasse reshaped by the composers Luigi Madonis and Domenico Dall’Oglio on the occasion of Elizabeth Petrovna’s coronation in 1742 as Tsarina Elizabeth I. For this production the opera was preceded by a prologue written by the scholar and poet Jacob von Stählin and set to music by Dall’Oglio; this provided uniqueness by casting it into the context of the beginning of the reign of Elizabeth I, Tito being an allegory of the new empress and her qualities as a ruler (Lutsker and Susidko 1999; Ferrazzi 2010; Starikova 2003, document 5; Giust 2014). The next steps in the evolution of opera in Russia included the staging of foreign operas in the Russian language but set to existing music (Italian, German or French), and the production of new plays directly in Russian, often following foreign models, but set to new music that included Russian popular themes for the sake of Russification (Mooser 1948–1951; Keldysh 1986; Giust 2014). These phases will be the object of analysis in the present chapter, which aims at demonstrating the essential role of translation in facilitating the transfer of the main models of European poetry for music into a new cultural environment. In regard to opera librettos, in particular, we can distinguish two main branches of translation, depending on their purpose. In the case of translations of Italian poetry for music, the Slavist Stefano Garzonio has made a distinction between texts for reading and those for singing (Gardzonio 1989). Librettos of intermezzi and comedies staged in Italian by the troupes that arrived from Dresden in the third decade of the eighteenth century were translated and printed in Russian and in French or German, for the sake of the audience, which generally did not know Italian. More precisely, their summaries were translated, incorporating a great deal of reported speech, while only some individual sentences, outlined in capital letters, were in direct speech (Vsevolodskii-Gerngross 1914). Notwithstanding the anonymity of these translations, the majority of the librettos in Russian from the years 1733–1735 should be ascribed to the poet Vasilii Trediakovskii.1 Translations into German were entrusted to Jacob von Stählin following his arrival in Saint Petersburg in 1735.2 Twice a week, by order of the Russian court, he prepared abstracts in German of Italian comedies, operas, and intermezzi, which were distributed at court before the performances (Ferrazzi 2000). A certain number of the summaries from the years 1733–1735 have been preserved (Peretts 1917). It seems, Russian spectators used to read them in order to better follow the plot, but people who had no opportunity to

68  Anna Giust attend the performances at court also read these texts. Thus, translation had the additional function of stimulating interest in theater outside the boundaries of the court circle (Starikova 1995). In addition to newspaper articles on performances staged by the first Italian troupes, these translations—which can be included among those “for reading”—made possible the development of theater criticism, representing an early attempt at the intellective appraisal of the art of theater—and dramaturgy as a part of it—after its initial emotional reception (Stählin 1995 [2]).3 The translations of the plays staged by Francesco Araja’s company, which was recruited in Italy in the years 1734–1735 and was to be active in Saint Petersburg throughout Anna’s and Elizabeth’s reigns, are ascribed to Petr Medvedev, the official interpreter of the troupe (Ferrazzi 2000). In the case of La forza dell’amore e dell’odio [The power of love and hatred]—the first opera seria staged by Araja at court in 1736—Stählin recalls that the libretto was printed by the Academy of Sciences in bilingual Italian-German and Italian-Russian editions (Stählin 1995 [1]). This is also the case with Il finto Nino ovvero la Semiramide riconosciuta, which became Pritvornyi Nin, ili Semiramida poznanna [The feigned Nino, or Semiramis recognized], and Artaserse [Artasers], both with librettos by Metastasio, staged for Tsarina Anna Ioannovna’s birthdays in 1737 and 1738, respectively. This will become the usual practice during Araja’s stay in Russia, until his first leave in 1759. According to Stählin, during Elizabeth’s 20-year rule, operas were composed and sung to Italian texts, while French, German, and Russian translations were always supplied for the audience (Stählin 2002). For instance, sources testify to the edition in Italian and Russian of the libretto of the opera Bellerofonte by Giuseppe Bonecchi (with music by Araja, Bonecchi 1750 [1–2]); later on the libretto was published in Italian, French and Russian on the occasion of its staging in Oranienbaum (Bonecchi 1757 [1–3]). The practice of translating librettos as a complement to the staging and to serve as a record of the event lasted until the nineteenth century. Librettos were issued in four languages (Russian, Italian, German and French), and their sale was advertised on playbills, not always in conjunction with the staging of the operas (Afishi). As it was for the early translations of laudatory odes of Italian court poets, these translations were not in verse but in prose. Moreover, they often originated from other languages. For example, at the end of the intermezzo Starik skupoi [The Old Miser], the libretto reads as follows:4 By these means the curious reader is informed that the arias and the two-voice passages that can be found here in Italian have been translated from French, from which the translator has done the translation. For this reason, it is thought that the Russian translation of these arias is more akin to the French than to the Italian style. They

Translation as Appropriation 69 have been included here in Italian according to the will of the person who has translated them from Italian into French [. . .]. (Ferrazzi 2000) According to the Russian libretto of La forza dell’amore e dell’odio, Trediakovskii translated it from a French prose version, and composed his verses without respecting the meter of the original arias.5 A later example is the case of La finta amante [The feigned lover] by Giovanni Battista Casti, set to music by Giovanni Paisiello, which premiered in 1780 in the city of Mogilev, on the occasion of Catherine II’s meeting with the Austrian emperor Joseph II (Casti w.d.); the libretto of this buffa was translated by Pavel Golenishchev-Kutuzov from French, and his version is entirely in prose (Golenishchev-Kutuzov 1801). The Italian-French edition shows the verse recitative translated in French prose. It seems this text was not intended for singing, but rather as a support for the audience during or outside performances staged in Italian: the translator’s aim was to familiarize the reader with the play. It is in the last quarter of the century that we find cases of theatrical librettos translated for the stage. According to the dictionary Muzykal’nii Peterburg, the first opera sung in a Russian translation was Antonio Salieri’s Armida, staged in 1774 following the translation made by the actor and playwright Ivan Dmitrevskii (Kriukov 2000). Russian libraries and archives house “original” scores by foreign musicians—composed initially on a libretto in a foreign language—to which translated text had been added later, in a practice called podtestovka [lyric-writing after music].6 Furthermore, these librettos were officially published—this time individually for each language—a detail that gave the Russian versions a life autonomous from the originals. As for La finta amante, another version is preserved in the manuscript section of the Russian National Library of Saint Petersburg with the title of Pritvornaia liubovnitsa [The feigned lover], in the complete score with Russian text (Paisiello 1780). For the staging, the Russian libretto was edited by Zakhar (or Zakharii) Kryzhanovskii, who possibly worked on Golenishchev-Kutuzov’s version, adapting it to a meter better suited for singing the pre-existing music. As an example, a passage from the first duet (act 1, scene 1) is presented next in the three mentioned versions. Here are the initial lines (Table 4.1 on p. 70):7 As one can see, the French version (second column) is in prose, while the Russian one (third column), which was composed for singing, is in verse. The accents of this latter version coincide with those of the Italian original (first column), but some differences can be noticed, in both meter and meaning. The overall formal structure is not affected, since the translator preserves the structure in two quatrains. The inner accents of each line correspond (they are placed on the first, third, fifth, and seventh syllables), but while the Italian original has in each quatrain three

70  Anna Giust Table 4.1 La finta amante by Casti—Golenishchev-Kutuzov—Kryzhanovskii— Act, Scene 1 Camilletta

Camille

Priiata

A qual trista condizione Devo stare io poveretta; Qui seder sola soletta Tutto il giorno a lavorar.

Malheureuse! À quelle triste condition je suis reduite! Toûjours seule, toûjours occupêe à travailler toute la journée! Mais en pensant à mon cher Gelino, je me console de mes peines. Dès qu’il s’approche de moi, mon coeur est dans la joie.

Kak Semila net so mnoiu, Slovno net dushi vo mne Bezprestanno rvus’ toskoiu Skuki chuvstvuiu odne

Poor me! To what miserable condition I am reduced! I am always all alone, always sitting here, always busy with work the whole day long! But when I think of my dear Gelino, I console myself from my pain. When he comes near to me, my heart rejoices.

When Semil is not with me, There is no life in me I suffer all time long from anguish And feel only distress.

E pensando al mio Gelino Fra le pene mi consolo: Sol che venga a me vicino Il mio cor fa giubilar. To what miserable condition I, poor me, am obliged; To sit here all alone Working the whole day long. While thinking of my Gelino I console myself in pain: Just by coming near to me He makes my heart rejoice.

No! To chto ego ne vizhu Il’ ne veren mne Semil? Akh ia zhizn’ voznenavizhu I umru kol’ izmenil.

But when I do not see him, I wonder whether he is sincere Ah! I hate life And will die if he is unfaithful.

octosyllabic lines followed by a seven-syllable one, in the Russian version both the second and the fourth lines of each stanza have seven syllables, with the accent on the last one. Moreover, the meanings of the two versions do not correspond; while in the original Camilletta suffers from the monotony of a miserable life and consoles herself with the thought of her lover, in the Russian translation her relationship with Gelino gives cause for apprehension, especially when she is far from her beloved. In contrast to the type of translations “intended for reading,” those “intended for singing” show a greater degree of adaptation to the context of reception, which reflects an emerging national consciousness, evident across the Russian cultural landscape of the time: with its subtitle “Opera ruskaia” [Russian Opera], La finta amante seems emblematic of the desire to appropriate it as part of the Russian operatic repertoire, the language of singing being a sufficient legitimation.8 Moreover, for the staging, the characters’ names were changed to Russian ones: Camilletta became Priiata—a nom parlant that will often occur in subsequent Russian comic operas, and which is derived from the adjective priiatnyi [pleasant]; Gelino and Don Girone became Semil and Prostiakov, respectively, other talking names created from the Russian prostoi [plain] and

Translation as Appropriation 71 vsem milyi [dear to all]. As for the place of the action, it is impossible to understand from the score whether it was transposed or not, but it is likely that it aligned with the characters’ provenance. Pritvornaia liubovnitsa is not an isolated example, since among the documented cases there also appears an intermezzo by Paisiello-Federico, La serva padrona (Sluzhanka gospozha [The servant turned mistress], Dmitrevskii 1781), and two operas by Martín y Soler-Da Ponte, Una cosa rara (Redkaia veshch’ [A rare thing], Dmitrevskii 1792a) and L’arbore di Diana (Diianino drevo [The tree of Diana], Dmitrevskii 1792b). These translations are the work of Ivan Dmitrevskii, who was the author of many other works of the same type.9 This practice was widespread in Moscow rather than in Saint Petersburg. According to the anonymous author of the Drammaticheskoi slovar’ [Drama dictionary] issued in 1787, “[. . .] in many (theaters) noblemen try their hand at the general utility of writing and translating dramatic works.” (Drammaticheskoi slovar’ 1881). Several translated plays were present in the repertoire of the Petrovskii Theater in Moscow, the ancestor of the present-day Bol’shoi Theater. Among the repertoire of the private theaters of Kuskovo and Ostankino, owned by the Sheremetev family,—which included Piccinni’s La buona figliola in a version entitled Dobraia devka [The Good-Natured Girl], also by Dmitrevskii (1782)—the most significant case is that of Les mariages samnites by André-Ernest-Modeste Grétry. This opéra-comique was performed in a Russian translation entitled Samnitskie braki [The Samnite marriages], edited by Grigorii Voroblevskii. The fact that it was intended for staging is confirmed by the presence of the musical score and vocal parts with Russian lyrics (Grétry n.d.). In this phase, both direct sources and secondary literature are not always clear in distinguishing the language in which the operas were actually performed; in early modern and Soviet times, the titles were given in the language of the source text, and not in the language in which the performances were staged, a fact that itself reflects the scant attention given by historians to the aspect of translation in performatory texts.10 Original languages and translations, both with original or new music, coexisted during the last quarter of the eighteenth century, and this had nothing to do with the nationality of the singers. While it is reasonable to assume that private Italian troupes (e.g., Mattei-Orecia’s troupe, which was active in Saint Petersburg in 1778–1781) sang their repertoires in Italian, the Russian and Italian court companies included singers of both nationalities, and cases have been documented of singers performing in languages different from their own, with texts written to scores in Latin or in Cyrillic characters for those singers who sang without understanding the foreign language of the lyrics, whether a European or a Russian. If the case of La finta amante can be extended to all operas staged in translation, we can suggest that in this phase of the reception of foreign opera by the Russian administrators of opera houses, the language represents the most important element of appropriation. As we have seen, other elements that

72  Anna Giust were changed most often were the characters’ names—and these changes appeared sufficient to allow for the opera to be described as “Russian,” an attempt, it would seem, to transform the original into something local. This practice is to be ascribed to the type of translation with sklonenie na russkie nravy [adaptation to Russian customs], which at that time was widespread in Russia, reflecting the growing need for original production. This practice was meant to facilitate understanding on the part of the Russian audience, with translators concerned both with the educational function of theater, based on Enlightenment ideals, and the difficulties presented by foreign realia (Maiellaro 1996; Deriugin 1995). Translations with sklonenie [adaptation], which allowed the translator much more freedom in rendering foreign works, soon led to the proliferation of increasingly less faithful versions. Peredelka [remaking] thus became a popular means of appropriating foreign repertoire and of transforming it into a national one. As far as I know, there does not exist any theoretical work on that epoch that discusses sklonenie in the specific field of opera. Nevertheless, this practice emphasizes issues common to this field, in Russia and abroad. A similar process of adaptation was found in the translation of Italian operas into other Western languages, testifying to the participation of the Russian theatrical scene in a phenomenon that was typical of European musical and cultural life in general. For example, this was the case with Mazzolà/Mozart’s La clemenza di Tito [Titus’s clemency], translated into German by Friedrich Rochlitz, and of Carlo Goldoni’s La buona figliola [The good-natured girl] (1760, music by Piccinni), which, after becoming La buena muchacha in Pau Esteve’s Catalan version (1765), was translated into French by Domenico Baccelli as La bonne fille (1771) (Durante 1994, 1995, 2007; Cortès 2009; Fabiano 1998; Gardzonio 1988, 2006). The approach seems to be the same across Europe, characterized by the fact that when dealing with changes occurring while transposing a libretto from one linguistic context to another, one has to keep in mind the particular “openness” of operatic texts when compared to the literary genres that are not produced for the stage. Finding a Russian equivalent of the lyrics was the main problem in the practice of singing foreign works in Russian.11 The metrics had to correspond exactly to the music, since podtestovka entailed that Russian texts were to be submitted to music already composed to texts in foreign languages (mostly French, but also Italian and German). In some cases this led to a modification of the music, in particular of the recitatives, as is the case of the aforementioned Mariages samnites. The vocal parts preserved in the archive of the Palace-Museum of Ostankino (Grétry n.d.)—where French opéras-comiques were staged in Russian translation—show that the different length of words and lines led to modification of note values, and therefore of the meter of the music. This resulted in translated recitatives that sounded different from the originals. In general, authors felt freer in relation to recitatives than to closed forms (arias, duets and ensembles), even though in this case, too, some

Translation as Appropriation 73 variability can be observed. Let us consider, for instance, Redkaia veshch’, the Russian version of Una cosa rara [A rare thing] by Lorenzo Da Ponte and Vicente Martín y Soler. The musical score contains only closed forms—a fact that suggests that recitatives had not, understandably, been subject to the process of podtestovka—and shows some freedom in the translation of closed forms when compared to the original libretto. A passage from the first trio (act 1, scene 3) is presented next in the version of the printed libretto (second column—[Dmitrevskii] 1792) and in the musical setting (Corrado’s role, third column—Martín y Soler n.d.). A comparison of the texts reveals differences not only in meaning, but also in form (Table 4.2). Table 4.2 Da Ponte—Dmitrevskii, Una cosa rara (Redkaia veshch’), act 1, scene 3 Una cosa rara

Redkaia veshch’— printed libretto

PRINCIPE Perché mai nel sen, perché, Cara madre ognor per te Palpitarmi il cor dovrà!

INFANT Akh pochto v opasnost’ stremias’ Mat’ liubezna! Na vsiakii chas Trepetat’ zastavliaesh’ nas? KOROLEVA Akh pochto v opasnost’ stremias’ Syn liubeznii! Na vsiakii chas Trepetat’ zastavliaesh’ nas? KORRADO Akh pochto v opasnost’ stremias’ Koroleva! Na vsiakii chas Trepetat’ zastavliaesh’ nas?

REGINA Perché mai nel sen, perché, Caro figlio, ognor per me Palpitarti il cor dovrà? CORRADO Perché mai nel sen, perché, Gran Regina, ognor per te Palpitarci il cor dovrà?

REGINA, PRINCIPE, CORRADO Deh, conserva a chi t’adora Una vita al ciel sì cara. REGINA Meco godi, amato figlio, E discaccia il tuo timor.

INFANT Beregi svoi vek dragotsennyi K shchast’iu smertnym opredelennyi KORRADO Syn tebia tvoi obozhaet, Ty emu i zhizn’ i svet.

Redkaia veshch’— Korrado’s vocal part

CORRADO Akh! pochto v opasnosti stremias’ Otchestva mat’! Na vsiakoi chas Trepetat’ zastavliaesh’ nas? Akh! pochto v opasnom stremias’ Trepetat’ my dolzhny dlia vas? Trepetat’ na vsiakoi chas? CORRADO Beregi ty zhizn’ nam zhelannu, K shchast’iu smertnym bogami dannu, Syn tvoi tebia obozhaet, Dlia tebia lish’ on zhivet.

(Continued)

74  Anna Giust Table 4.2 (Continued) Una cosa rara

Redkaia veshch’— printed libretto

PRINCIPE, CORRADO In te vive il figlio ancora, In te vive il genitor.

KOROLEVA Kol’ menia syn okhraniaet Strakha i bedy mne net!

PRINCE Why in my chest, why Will, dear mother, all time long, My heart tremble for you?

PRINCE Ah! Why do you, dear mother, Make me tremble all time long, Venturing in danger?

QUEEN Why in my chest, why Will, dear son, all time long, Your heart tremble for me? CORRADO Why in my chest, why Will, Great Queen, all time long, Our heart tremble for you?

QUEEN Ah! Why do you, dear son, Make me tremble all time long, Venturing in danger? CORRADO Ah! Why do you, our Queen, Make us tremble all time long, Venturing in danger? PRINCE Do preserve your precious life, Fortunately destined to the mortals. CORRADO Your son adores you, You are for him both life and light. QUEEN Ah! If my son safeguards me There will not be any fear or trouble.

QUEEN, PRINCE, CORRADO Do preserve for those who adore you A life so dear to Heaven. QUEEN Dear son, do rejoice And push the fear away PRINCE, CORRADO Your son lives in you, The parent lives in you.

Redkaia veshch’— Korrado’s vocal part

CORRADO Ah! Why do you, our Queen, Make us tremble all time long, Venturing in danger? CORRADO Do preserve your desirable life, Fortunately offered by gods to the mortals. Your son adores you, He lives only for you.

In the Russian podtestovka the meter, which is the means by which the librettist traditionally exerts his influence on the musical setting, is conditioned by the pre-existing music: in this passage the seven-syllable lines of the first tercets gain, in the Russian translation, one more syllable, and this is due to the need to follow the disposition of the accents of the music, which has an accent on the seventh syllable according to the original Italian lyrics. The same process affects the first distich: the synaloepha present in both lines (“Dèh, consèrvaIa chì t’adòra/Ùna vìtaIal cièl si càra”) allows for both lines to consist of eight syllables, with accents on the first, third, fifth, and seventh syllables. This meter is not preserved

Translation as Appropriation 75 in the Russian versions, where the lines have nine syllables each. In the second distich, both Russian versions preserve the meter of the original. The length of the line is the same, and the inversion evident in the manuscript—“Sỳn tvòi tebià obozhàet” instead of Dmitrevskii’s “Sỳn tebià tvòi obozhàet,” which results in a shift in tonic accents—is possibly a transcription error since the printed libretto’s line successfully reproduces the disposition of the accents of the original (“Mèco gòdiIamàto fìglio”). The authors were aware of the complexities originating from the translation of lyrics that had already been set to music. In the case of the Sheremetev theaters, the main translator of that “court,” Grigorii Voroblevskii, felt unable to accomplish a translation in verse. Referring to the opera Les souliers mordorés by Alexandre Fridzeri with a libretto by Alexandre Leblanc De Ferrières, the translator wrote to Count Petr Borisovich: Last year Your Excellency ordered me to translate this comédie lyrique from French into Russian for its staging in Your Excellency’s theater. I had to put all my effort into trying to fulfill this, because I have not been practicing in poetry for thirty years, and (not being an expert of music) I never translated arias or songs that were already set to music. (Kuz’min 1959) This kind of problem led him further away from literary translation. For example, according to Aleksandr Kuz’min, in 1781, while translating Sedaine’s drame lyrique Le déserteur (Beglyi soldat), Voroblevskii moved away from his usual literary translation of the text. He tried to make the play more comprehensible for Russian spectators, and thus belonged among those contemporary translators who adapted the translated plays to Russian customs. For instance, Voroblevskii found it necessary to replace the foreign names of some characters with Russian ones: Jeannette—Aniuta, Montauciel—Sud’binin. In the dialogue, he introduced typical Russian phrases: “Oh, ça, écoutez”—in slushaite zh. Where Aniuta tells the soldier: “Monsieur, monsieur, allez au Château,” the translation reads, Gospodin sluzhivoi [obsolete form for “soldier”], poidem v zamok [let’s go to the castle]; “voilà un petit écu” corresponds to vot tebe poltina [please take a poltina, that is, an ancient coin of fifty kopecks], and so on (Kuz’min 1959). Also due, perhaps, to the difficulties involved with rendering poetry from Western languages into Russian, the translation of foreign verses with Russian equivalents was often abandoned in favor of spoken dialogue. In some scores with Russian podtestovka, such as Redkaia veshch’ or Sluzhanka gospozha, recitatives are not present, and one can assume that they were staged in the form of opéra-comique, that is, with spoken prose dialogues replacing singing in those parts of the libretto that

76  Anna Giust pushed the dramatic action forward. This practice of replacing recitatives with spoken dialogues was itself bound to the peculiar reception of opera in Russia, as audiences were unwilling to endure long and non-life-like Italian recitatives set to music, as in the case of La forza dell’amore e dell’odio, or Semiramide riconosciuta (Vsevolodskii-Gerngross 2003). This had important consequences for the evolution of Russian musical theater, as detailed next. On the one hand, the staging of foreign works in translation supported the idea of creating a national repertoire of local works, the possibility of singing in Russian having been successfully tested in the court or courtrelated theaters of Moscow and Saint Petersburg. In particular, the reign of Catherine II witnessed the creation of a great number of Russian plays including music. About a hundred and fifty works followed the line inaugurated by Mikhail Popov’s Aniuta in 1772, all belonging to the genre of opera komicheskaia [comic opera]. Even Catherine II tried her hand at this genre, producing five comic operas set to music by Vicente Martín y Soler, Ernest Vaňura, and Vasilii Pashkevich. Although Russian operas of this period show the persistence of foreign models—some of which have been pointed out by Simon Karlinsky (Karlinsky 1984)—early komicheskie opery can be considered a specific genre in their own right, equivalent to the European forms, such as the French opéra-comique, the Spanish zarzuela, and the Austro-German Singspiel, which included spoken dialogues interspersed with small musical numbers in plays dealing with light subjects that reflected the everyday life of characters belonging to a geographic and cultural area more defined than in previous opera seria. While traditional historiography has treated early Russian comic operas only in reference to the political positions they were believed to endorse, these works form a corpus that was actually perceived by contemporaries as a monumental achievement of Russian national culture, as attested to by the collection Rossiiskii featr [Russian theater], edited by the Russian Academy at the request of Catherine II under the direction of Princess Ekaterina Dashkova.12 On the other hand, we can suggest that the issues highlighted here in connection with the translation of poetry for music strongly influenced the form that early Russian comic opera was to take—a brief (one- or two-act) play that included songs, vocal ensembles, and occasionally choruses interspersed with spoken prose dialogues. Instead of following in the steps of Sumarokov’s operas, which contained elements of Italian music-dramaturgy (Tsefal i Prokris [Cephalus and Procris], 1755, Altsesta [Alcestis], 1759), early Russian opera developed in parallel with European musical comedy, thus putting Russian national culture in a direct relationship with the main European trends, and revealing the dominance of cosmopolitism over nationalism in Russian music history.

Translation as Appropriation 77

Notes 1 Vasilii Kirillovich Trediakovskii (1703–1768) was one of the first theorists of Russian literary language. Trediakovskii embodied his early ideas on versification in the translation of Fénelon’s Les aventures de Télemaque (Telemakhida, 1730). In 1732, he started working as a translator for the Academy of Sciences, and became member of a commission of scholars gathered in order to codify the Russian literary language. In 1735, he published his Novyi i kratkii sposob k slozheniiu rossiiskikh stikhov [Brief method for composing Russian verse] in which he put into practice his idea about versification, much inspired by popular poetry and the canons of Latin metrics. His works fostered the discussion on the Russian literary language, stimulating the responses of other scholars and poets, such as Lomonosov and Kantemir. 2 Born in Memmingen (Germany) in 1709, Stählin had arrived in Russia after the invitation by the Academy of Sciences of Saint Petersburg, where he remained until his death in 1785. Two years after his arrival, he was appointed adjunct to the Academy of Sciences for eloquence and poetry studies, ethics and law, and started working as an inventor of illuminations and fireworks. He also managed the official correspondence between the Academy, the Court and the Senate, when they were in Moscow. Later on, he was in charge of the organization of Anna Ioannovna’s funeral. In the years 1735–1737, as music correspondent, he issued the German edition of Sanktpeterburgskie vedomosti (Sankt-Petersburger Zeitung [Saint Petersburg gazette]); from 1738 to 1742 he wrote articles for the popular appendix of the newspaper, entitled Primechaniia na Sankpeterburgskie vedomosti [Notes to the Saint Petersburg gazette], printed twice a week over a four-month period. Timed to the staging of court performances, its aim was to enlighten the Russian society in several realms of culture and science, and, specifically, to familiarize readers with opera. Stählin also tried his hand at poetry writing, although the artistic value of his occasional poems is now considered disputable. In his time, however, he gained enormous personal success, which led him to become, starting 1 June 1742, librarian and tutor for the Grand Duke Petr Fedorovich. By the end of the 1730s, Stählin committed himself to art history, and at the end of 1747, he founded an Academy of Fine Arts as a branch of the Academy of Sciences, assuming the direction of the institution. In March 1766, he was appointed permanent Secretary of the Academy. Towards the end of the 1760s, Stählin progressively devoted himself to art and music history. Having been a flute player in his youth (from 1732), Stählin had studied at the university of Leipzig, a city that by that time was an important musical centre in Germany. He had close contacts with Bach’s family, in particular Carl Philipp Emanuel, and played in the Collegium Musicum directed by Johann Sebastian. His music activity in Moscow began in 1742, when he conducted the orchestra rehearsals of La clemenza di Tito, designed costumes for the singers, and played the flute in the orchestra. He is also the author of the prologue composed and staged before the Muscovite premiere of the opera, La Russia Afflitta e Racconsolata [Afflicted and comforted Russia, 1742] (Giust 2014). 3 In Starikova’s collection, several documents of this type are reported (see Starikova 1995, Docs. 303, 305, 327, 330, 331). 4 Here and further the translations in this chapter are mine, A. G., if not otherwise indicated. 5 In any case, the will to render the original more faithfully is not to be excluded: as for Pritvornyi Nin (The feigned Nino, 1737), Vsevolodskii-Gerngross observes that in comparing the translations by Medvedev and Trediakovskii,

78  Anna Giust Medvedev is considerably clearer and his style is lighter. Moreover, his verses are rhymed (Vsevolodskii-Gerngross 1914). 6 Among these, I had the opportunity to study the following scores in reference to the eighteenth century: Martín y Soler, Vicente. Redkaia veshch’ komicheskaia opera v 2-kh aktakh, Partitura b. d. Rukopis’ na russkom iazyke [A rare thing, comic opera in two acts, Full score, undated. Manuscript in Russian language], housed at the library of the “M. I. Glinka” Central Museum of Musical Culture (Moscow, GTsMMK), F. 187 (M. S. Vorontsov), ed. khr. 9; Paisiello, Giovanni;“Sluzhanka-gospozha” komicheskaia opera v 2-kh aktakh, Partitura, Postavlena v Peterburge v 1781 g. [The servant turned mistress, comic opera in two acts, Full score, Performed in Saint Petersburg in 1781], manuscript copy, housed at the library of the “M. I. Glinka” Central Museum of Musical Culture (Moscow, GTsMMK), F. 187 (M. S. Vorontsov), ed. khr. 14, Tekst na rus. iaz. Rukopis’; Paisiello, Giovanni. [1780]. Opera ruskaia Pritvornaia liubovnitsa, v dvukh deiistviakh, Muzyka sochinena Gym Paiselolom [sic] Slova polozheny na muzyku s italiianskago na ruskoi Gym. Kryzhanovskim [Russian opera The feigned lover, in two acts, music composed by Mr Paisiello, words set to the music from Italian to Russian by Mr Kryzhanovskii], manuscript copy of the full score, preserved in the Manuscript section of the Russian National Library of Saint Petersburg (RNB OR), F. 550 OSRK II 279 F. XII. 63; Martín y Soler, Vicente. Redkaia veshch’ [A rare thing], Corrado’s role, fragment, manuscript copy, preserved in the manuscript section of the A. A. Bakhrushin State Central Theatre Museum (Moscow); Paisiello, Giovanni. Neizvestnaia opera 18go veka, partiia dlia golosa [Unknown opera of the eighteenth century, vocal part], housed at the manuscript section of the A. A. Bakhrushin State Central Theatre Museum “A. A. Bakhrushin” (Moscow), F. 577, op. 38. The latter can be easily recognized as Paisiello’s The Servant Turned Mistress, Uberto’s role, manuscript copy. 7 According to the tradition of eighteenth-century opera, a duet foresees a fourpart text to be sung: The first stanza is usually exposed by one character, and the second by the other. In the third stanza the two characters converse, while in the last they sing together. 8 This conception was to be overcome and considered unsatisfactory with the raising of modern nationalism, in nineteenth century, when an opera, in order to be considered authentically “Russian,” had to show original features in the music. This meant, beyond a Russian libretto, the complete (when possible) rejection of the imitation of Italian models, and the reference to the Russian prosody and folklore in the music. 9 Apart from the editions mentioned above, among Ivan Afanas’evich Dmitrevskii’s translations appear: Dobraia devka, komicheskaia opera v trekh deistviiakh, Muzyka G. Pichini. Sochinena podrazhaia Italianskoi. Pervoi raz predstavlena na Kuskovskom teatre sobstvennymi Ego Siiatel’stva Grafa Petra Borisovicha Sheremeteva pevitsami i pevchimi Iiulia 2 dnia, 1782 goda [The good-natured girl, comic opera in three acts, music by Mr. Piccinni. Composed imitating the Italian. Premiered at the Kuskovo theater by the singers of His Excellency Count Petr Borisovich Sheremetev, on 2 July 1782], Moscow; Trubochist kniaz’ i kniaz’ trubochist, komicheskaia opera v odnom deistvii. S Italiianskago vol’no perevedennaia i prinarovlennaia pod Muzyku G-na Portogalli [The prince chimney sweep, comic opera in one act. Translated from the Italian and adapted to the music of Mr. Portogallo]. 1795. St. Petersburg. Ivan Dmitrevskii also published his translations of Marco Coltellini’s Antigona and Francesco Saverio Zini’s La bella pescatrice (Rybachka). Other translations remained in manuscript form (Gardzonio 2006).

Translation as Appropriation 79 10 Even the accredited music historian R.-A. Mooser records performances only in his language (French), not always matching them with the original title (Mooser 1945 [1], 1945 [2], 1948–1951). 11 In particular, the issue of metrics in poetry for music translated from Italian into Russian has been discussed at length by Stefano Garzonio (see list of references). 12 A great number of the operas staged on Russian scenes were collected in the anthology Rossiiskii featr, ili Polnoe sobranie vsekh Rossiiskikh Featral’nykh sochinenii [Russian theatre, or Full collection of all Russian theatrical works]. The collection, consisting of 43 parts, was issued by the Imperial Academy of Sciences under the supervision of Ekaterina Dashkova, in the period from 1786 to 1794. At the Russian National Library of Saint Petersburg a sort of sequel of this issue is housed in some numbers, with the slightly different title of Polnoe sobranie vsekh teatral’nykh sochinenii na rossiiskom iazyke imeiushchikhsia [Full collection of all theatrical works in Russian language]. In contrast with the edition issued by the Academy of Sciences, this is not an official version, but rather a series of bindings compiled seemingly for the private use of some Egor Davydov. Every collection features different librettos bound together, with the title page written by hand on the cover, possibly by the owner himself, dated Saint Petersburg 1801. These volumes do not figure in the catalogue of the library as a unique edition (they are not an edition, actually), single librettos having been recorded separately. Nevertheless, every binding was seemingly considered by the compiler as a sequel of Rossiiskii featr, the numeration of each volume continuing that of the Academy of Sciences, making clear the aim of carrying on the series, including not only original works, but a good deal of translations, too.

References Primary sources Afishi = Afishi Imperatorskikh Teatrov, housed at the periodical section of the Russian National Library (RNB OG). Bonecchi, Giuseppe. 1750 [1]. Bellerofonte, festa teatrale per musica da rappresentarsi all’Imperial Corte di Russia il di 25 Novembre 1750: per festeggiare l’annua solennitá dell’innanzamento al trono di Sua Maestá Imperiale Elisabetta Petrowna imperatrice di tutte le Russie etc: La poesia é del signor dottor G. Bonechj Fiorentino poeta di S. M. I. etc: La musica e del signor F. Araya Napolitano, maestro di cappella di S. M. I. etc. St. Pietroburgo: nella stamperia dell’Accademia Imperiale delle Scienze. Bonecchi, Giuseppe. 1750 [2]. Bellerofont, Opera vnove pokazana v Sanktpeterburge na novopostroennom pridvornom teatre v den’ prazdnestva vozshestviia na prestol eia imperatorskago velikiia gosudaryni imperatritsy Elisavety Petrovny samoderzhitsy Vserossiiskiia i proch. i proch. i proch. [Bellerophon, opera newly performed in Saint Petersburg at the new court theater on the anniversary of the ascension to the throne of the great sovereign the empress Elizaveta Petrovna, autocrat of all Russias etc. etc. etc.]. St. Petersburg: Pech. pri Imp. Akad. nauk. Bonecchi, Giuseppe. 1757 [1]. Bellerofonte, festa tèatrale per musica da rappresentarsi nel Teatro d’Oragien-Baum [sic] per comando di Sua Altezza Impériale il gran duca di tutte le Russie etc: La poesia è del signor dottore Giuseppe Bonechi Fiorentino fu poeta di Sua Maestà Impériale; La musica è del signor

80  Anna Giust Francescò Araya Napolitano, maèstro di capella di Sua Maestà Impériale. St. Pietroburgo: nella stamperia dell’Accademia Impériale delle Science [sic]. Bonecchi, Giuseppe. 1757 [2]. Bellerophon: Opéra représenté sur le Théâtre d’Oranienbaum par ordre de Son Altesse Impériale monseigneur le grand duc etc./La poésie est de Mr. le docteur J. Bonechi Florentin cy-devant poête de S.M.I. etc.; La musique de Mr. Fr. Araya Napolitain, maître de chapelle de S.M.I. etc. St. Pétersbourg: De l’Imprimerie de l’Académie Impériale des sciences. Bonecchi, Giuseppe. 1757 [3]. Bellerofont, Opera predstavlennaia na teatre v Oranienbome po poveleniiu e. i. v. gosudaria velikago kniazia . . ., Stikhi sochineni doktorom Bonekiem florentintsom byvshim stikhotvortsom eia imp. velichestva. Muzyka g. Frantsiska Araii neapolitantsa eia imp: velichestva kapel’-meistera [Bellerophon, Opera staged at the theater of Oranienbaum according to the order of the Grand Duke . . . The poetry was composed by Doctor Bonecchi from Florence, former poet of her imp. majesty: Music by Mr Francesco Araja from Naples, kappeelmeister of her imp. majesty]. St. Petersburg: Pech. pri Imp. Akad. nauk. Casti, Giovanni Battista. [without date]. La finta amante, Opera comica in due atti per musica da rappresentarsi nel teatro della Corte di SUA MAESTA IMPERIALE CATERINA II, Imperatrice di Tutte le Russie, La fausse amante, Opéra-comique en deux actes, représenté sur le Théâtre de la Cour de SA MAJESTE IMPERIALE CATHERINE II Impératrice de toutes les Russies [The feigned lover, comic opera in two acts with music, to be staged at the court theater of Her Imperial Majesty Catherine II], Italian-French version. Dmitrevskii, Ivan Afanas’evich [translation]. 1781. Sluzhanka gospozha, intermediia v dvukh deistviiakh, predstavlennaia na Pridvornom Teatre. Muzyka sochinena slavnym G. Paisiellom, 1781 goda [The servant turned mistress, intermezzo in two acts, staged at the Court theatre. Music composed by the renown Mr Paisiello, 1781]. St. Petersburg. Dmitrevskii, Ivan Afanas’evich [translation]. 1792a. Redkaia veshch’, opera komicheskaya v dvukh deistviiakh, perelozhena s Italianskago na Rossiiskii iazyk pod muzyku G. Martini. Predstavlena v Sanktpeterburge Rossiiskimi pridvornymi Akterami [A rare thing, comic opera in two acts, set from Italian into Russian to the music of Mr. Martini. Premiered in Saint Petersburg by the Russian actors of the Court]. St. Petersburg: Tipografiia G. Krylova s tovaryshchi. Dmitrevskii, Ivan Afanas’evich [translation]. 1792b. Diianino drevo ili torzhestvuiushchaia liubov’, komicheskaia opera v dvukh deystviiakh, peredelannaia s Italianskogo na Rossiiskii iazyk i pod muzyku G. Martini podvedennaia. Predstavlennaia v Sanktpeterburge Rossiiskimi pridvornymi aktiorami mnogokratno. [L’arbore di Diana ovvero Il trionfo dell’amore, comic opera in two acts, remade from Italian in Russian and set to the music of Mr Martini. Staged in Saint Petersburg many times by the actors of the Court]. St. Petersburg: Tipografiia I. Krylova i tovarishchi. Drammaticheskoi slovar’, ili pokazaniia po alfavitu vsekh Rossiiskikh teatral’nykh sochinenii i perevodov, s oznacheniem imen izvestnykh sochinitelei, perevodchikov i slagatelei muzyki, kotoryia kogda byli predstavleny na teatrakh, i gde i v kotoroe vremia napechatany. 1881. [Drama dictionary, or an alphabetical index of all Russian theatrical works and translations ever staged with names of all known writers, translators and composers of the music and an indication of

Translation as Appropriation 81 the place and time of publication. Reprint of the 1787 edition]. St. Petersburg: izdanie knizhnago magazina “Novago vremeni.” Golenishchev-Kutuzov, Pavel. 1801. Pritvornaia liubovnitsa, komicheskaia opera v dvukh deistviiakh, predstavlennaia v prisutstvii EIA IMPERATORSKAGO VELICHESTVA [La finta amante, Comic opera in two acts, staged in the Presence of Her Imperial Majesty], V SANKTPETERBURGE Pechatano v Tipografii morskago shliakhetnago kadetskago korpusa [without date]. In Polnoe sobranie vsekh featral’nykh sochinenii na rossiiskom iazyke imeiushchikhsia [Full collection of all theatrical works in Russian language]. Chast’ 69. [Amateur compilation of librettos,] Russian National Library. St. Petersburg. Grétry, André. [without date]. Samnitskie braki [Les mariages samnites], manuscript vocal parts housed at Library of the Ostankino Palace and Museum of Moscow, OM 6 k. k. Iz knig grafa Nikolaia Petrovicha Sheremeteva. Ia. Sh. [Stählin, Jacob von]. 1995 [1]. K istorii teatra v Rossii (Iz ne opublikovannykh eshche memuarov professora Istorii iziashchnykh iskusstv v Rossii gosudarstvennogo sovetnika i sekretaria Peterburgskoi Akademii nauk gospodina Iakoba fon Shtelina [Towards a history of theater in Russia (From still unpublished memoirs of professor of fine arts in Russia, the state counselor and secretary of the Academy of Sciences of Saint Petersburg Mr Jacob von Stählin)].” In Teatral’naia zhizn’ Rossii v epokhe Anny Ioannovny: Dokumental’naia khronika, 1730–1740 [Russian Theatrical Life at Anna Ioannovna’s Time: A Documented Chronicle, 1730–1740], edited by Liudmila M. Starikova, 532–576 (Doc. 334). Moscow: Radiks. Ia. Sh. [Stählin, Jacob von]. 1995 [2]. Istoricheskoe opisanie onago teatral’nago deistviia, kotoroe nazyvaetsia opera [Historical description of the theatrical action called ‘opera’], in Prilozheniia k gazete “Sankt-Peterburgskie vedomosti” za 1738 god (Chasti 17–21, 33, 34, 39–49) [Notes to the Gazette of Saint Petersburg for the year 1738 (Parts 17–21, 33, 34, 39–49)]. In Teatral’naia zhizn’ Rossii v epokhe Anny Ioannovny. Dokumental’naia khronika, 1730– 1740 [Russian Theatrical Life at Anna Ioannovna’s Time: A Documented Chronicle, 1730–1740], edited by Liudmila M. Starikova, Doc. 327. Moscow: Radiks. Ia. Sh. [Stählin, Jacob von]. 2002. Muzyka i balet v Rossii XVIII veka [Music and Ballet in 18th-Century Russia]. St. Petersburg: Soiuz khudozhnikov. Martín y Soler, Vicente. [without date]. Opera Redkaia veshch’, rol’ Korado [Opera A rare thing, Corrado’s role], fragment, manuscript copy, preserved in the manuscript section of the State Central Theatrical Museum A. A. Bakhrushin State Central Theatre Museum (Moscow). F. 577. Op. 13. Paisiello, Giovanni. 1780. Opera ruskaia Pritvornaia liubovnitsa, v dvukh deistviiakh, Muzyka Sochinena Gym Paiselolom [sic] Slova polozheny na muzyku s italiianskago na ruskoi Gym. Kryzhanovskim [1780 g.] [Russian opera the feigned lover, in two acts, music by Mr Paisiello, words set to music from the Italian in Russian by Mr Kryzhanovskii], manuscript copy of the full score, housed in the manuscript section of the Russian National Library of St. Petersburg (RNB OR). F. 550. OSRK II 279 F. XII. 63. Starikova, Liudmila M. (ed.). 1995. Teatral’naia zhizn’ Rossii v epokhe Anny Ioannovny. Dokumental’naia khronika, 1730–1740 [Russian theatrical life at Anna Ioannovna’s time: A documented chronicle, 1730–1740]. Moscow: Radiks.

82  Anna Giust Starikova, Liudmila M. (ed.). 2003. Teatral’naia zhizn’ Rossii v epokhe Elizavety Petrovny: dokumental’naia khronika [Russian theatrical life at Elizabeth Petrovna’s time: A documented chronicle]. Vypusk II, Ch. I. Moscow: Nauka.

Secondary sources Cortès, Francesc. 2009. “Le versioni variate dei libretti operistici: ‘La buona figliola’ e ‘Gli uccellatori’ [Altered versions of operatic librettos: ‘La buona figliola’ and ‘Gli uccellatori’].” In Problemi di critica goldoniana [Issues of Goldonian Criticism] XIV, tomo primo, edited by Manlio Pastore Stocchi and Gilberto Pizzamiglio, 135–154. Ravenna: Longo Editore. Deriugin, Aleksandr Aleksandrovich. 1995. “Soderzhanie perevodcheskogo priema ‘Sklonenie na nashi (russkie) nravy’ [Substance of the method of translation “adaptations to our (Russian) customs”].” Izvestiia Akademii nauk: Seriia literatury i iazyka [Notices of the Academy of Sciences, Series of Language and Literature] 54 (5): 61–64. Durante, Sergio. 1994. “Quando Tito divenne Titus, Le prime traduzioni tedesche della Clemenza mozartiana ed il ruolo di Friedrich Rochlitz [When Tito became Titus, the first German translations of Mozart’s “Clemenza” and the role of Friedrich Rochlitz].” In Max Lütolf Zum 60. Geburtstag, Festschrift, edited by Bernhard Hangartner, and Urs Fischer, 247–258. Basel: Wiese Verlag. Durante, Sergio. 1995. “La ‘Clemenza’ di Jahn, ovvero Le nozze perturbate di Musica e Filologia [Jahn’s Clemenza, or the Disturbed Wedding Between Music and Philology].” In L’edizione critica tra testo musicale e testo letterario, Atti del convegno internazionale [The critical edition between music and literary text, proceedings of the international conference], edited by Renato Borghi, and Pietro Zappalà, 341–349. Lucca: Libreria Musicale Italiana. Durante, Sergio. 2007. Studies on Mozart and the 18th Century. Lucca: Libreria Musicale Italiana. Fabiano, Andrea. 1998. I ‘buffoni’ alla conquista di Parigi, Storia dell’opera italiana in Francia tra “Ancien Régime” e Restaurazione (1752–1815) [The “buffoons” at the conquest of Paris, a history of Italian opera in France between the “Ancien Régime” and the Restoration (1752–1815)]. Torino: De Sono-Paravia. Ferrazzi, Maria Luisa. 2000. Commedie e comici dell’arte italiani alla corte russa (1731–1738) [Italian Comedies and Comic Actors at the Russian Court (1731– 1738)]. Rome: Bulzoni. Ferrazzi, Maria Luisa. 2010. Teatral’nye torzhestva po sluchaiu koronatsii imperatritsy Elizavety Petrovny: prolog ‘Rossiia po pechali paki obradovannaia’ i opera-seria ‘Miloserdie Tita’ [The theatrical celebrations for the coronation of Empress Elizaveta Petrovna: the prologue “Afflicted and comforted Russia” and the opera seria “The clemency of Titus”]. In Okkazional’naia literatura v kontekste prazdnichnoi kul’tury XVIII veka [The occasional literature in the context of the festive culture of the eighteenth century], edited by P. Bukharkin, U. Ekuch and N. Kochetkova, 311–324. St. Petersburg: Filologicheskii fakul’tet Sankt-Peterburgskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta. Gardzonio [Garzonio], Stefano. 1988. “Russkie stikhotvornye perevody i peredelki ital’ianskikh opernykh libretto (kon. XVIII v.) [Russian verse translations and remakes of Italian operatic librettos (late 18th century)].” Europa Orientalis 7: 307–320.

Translation as Appropriation 83 Gardzonio [Garzonio], Stefano. 1989. “Stikh russkikh poeticheskikh perevodov ital’ianskikh opernykh libretto XVIII v.” [The verse in Russian poetic translations of 18th-century Italian librettos]. Slavic Studies 18: 107–132. Garzonio, Stefano. 1994. “A proposito di alcune traduzioni manoscritte di melodrammi italiani conservati a Mosca [About some manuscript translations of Italian operas preserved in Moscow].” Ricerche slavistiche [Slavic Studies] XLI: 239–260. Gardzonio [Garzonio], Stefano. 2006. “I. A. Dmitrevskii—perevodchik ital’ianskikh p’es [I. A. Dmitrevskii—translator of Italian plays].” In Osnovanie natsional’nogo teatra i sud’by russkoi dramaturgii (K 250-letiiu sozdaniia teatra v Rossii) [The foundation of the national theatre and the destiny of Russian drama (For the 250th anniversary of the foundation of theatre in Russia)], edited by E. A. Ivanovna et al., 84–90. St. Petersburg: Ros. Ak. N., S.-P. nauchnyi tsentr IRLI (P. d.) Ross. Obshchestvo po izucheniiu XVIII veka. Giust, Anna. 2014. Cercando l’opera russa, La formazione di una coscienza nazionale nel repertorio operistico del Settecento [Towards Russian opera: The formation of a national consciousness in 18th-century operatic repertoire]. Milan: Feltrinelli-Amici della Scala. Gozenpud, Abram Akimovich. 1959. Muzykal’nyi teatr v Rossii: Ot istokov do Glinki: Ocherk [Musical theatre in Russia: from the origins to Glinka: an essay]. Leningrad: Gosudarstvennoe muzykal’noe izdatel’stvo. Jensen, Claudia and Ingrid Maier. 2013. “Orpheus and Pickleherring in the Kremlin: The ‘Ballet’ for the Tsar of February 1672.” Scando-Slavica 59 (2): 145–184. Karlinsky, Simon. 1984. “Russian Comic Opera in the Age of Catherine the Great.” 19th-Century Music 7 (3) (Essays for Joseph Kerman): 318–325. Keldysh, Iurii V. (ed.). 1984. Istoriia russkoi muzyki, XVIII vek, chast’ pervaia [History of Russian music, the 18th century, first part]. II. Moscow: Muzyka. Keldysh, Iurii V. (ed.). 1986. Istoriia russkoi muzyki, XVIII vek chast’ vtoraia [History of Russian music, the 18th century, second Part]. III. Moscow: Muzyka. Kriukov, Andrei Nikolaevich. 2000. “Perevody i perevodchiki [Translations and translators].” In Muzykal’nyi Peterburg, Entsiklopedicheskii slovar’ [Musical Petersburg, Encyclopedia], edited by Anna L. Porfir’eva, Kn. 2, 349–351. St. Petersburg: Kompozitor. Kuz’min, Aleksandr Ivanovich. 1959. “Krepostnoi literator V. G. Voroblevskii [The Literary Man and Serf V. G. Voroblevskii].” XVIII vek [18th Century] 4: 136–156. Lutsker, Pavel Valer’evich, and Irina Susidko. 1999. “ ‘Miloserdie Tita’ v Rossii” [“Titus’s clemency” in Russia]. Starinnaia muzyka [Ancient music] 3: 8–11. Maiellaro, Gina. 1996. “Lo ‘sklonenie na russkie nravy’ nelle commedie di V. Lukin” [The ‘sklonenie na russkie nravy’ in V. Lukin’s Comedies]. Europa Orientalis XV (2): 25–49. Mooser, Robert-Aloys. 1945 [1]. L’opéra comique français en Russie au XVIIIe. siècle: contribution à l’histoire de la musique russe. Geneva-Monaco: Kister. Mooser, Robert-Aloys. 1945 [2]. Operas, Intermezzos, Ballets, Cantates, Oratorios: joués en Russie durant le 18e siècle, avec l’indication des oeuvres de compositeurs russes parues en Occident à la même époque: Essai d’un repertoire alphabetique et chronologique. Geneva: A. Kundig.

84  Anna Giust Mooser, Robert-Aloys. 1948–1951. Annales de la musique et des musiciens en Russie au XVIIIme siècle I—III. Geneva: Mont-Blanc. Peretts, Vladimir Nikolaevich. 1917. Ital’ianskie komedii i intermedii, predstavlennye pri dvore imperatritsy Anny Ioannovny v 1733–1735 gg: Teksty [Italian comedies and intermezzi at Anna Ioannovna’s court in the years 1733–1735: The texts]. Petrograd: Imperatorskaia Akademiia Nauk. Vsevolodskii-Gerngross, Vsevolod. 1914. Teatr v Rossii pri imperatritse Anne Ioannovne i imperatore Ioanne Antonoviche [The theater in Russia at the time of Empress Anna Ioannovna and Emperor Ioann Antonovich]. St. Petersburg: Tipografiia Imperatorskikh SPB teatrov. Vsevolodskii-Gerngross, Vsevolod. 2003. Teatr v Rossii pri imperatritse Elizavete Petrovne [The theater in Russia at the time of the Empress Elizaveta Petrovna]. St. Petersburg: Giperion.

5 Eighteenth-Century Russian Women Translators in the History of Russian Women’s Writing Olga Demidova Despite a considerable amount of data on eighteenth-century Russian women translators1 and research based on it, most notably Rosslyn (2000); Preuss (2008); and Tyulenev (2011), the topic has yet to be treated historically as a homogeneous cultural phenomenon with certain regularly occurring features characterizing it as a distinct literary activity, which in many ways defined the further development of Russian women’s literature and female literary careers.2 As Sergey Tyulenev argues, “the studies of Russian women-translators are not more than an embryo: one encounters individual articles but no coherent study exists” (Tyulenev 2011, 76), and “translational activities of women in Russia have never been a primary scholarly focus” (Tyulenev 2011, 79). Compilers and editors of (bio)bibliographies were mostly interested in women’s original writings rather than their translation activity, a fact that influenced the choice of names and texts included, while in Western and (especially) Russian scholarship translations by both men and women were for a long time regarded primarily as facts and/or illustrations of Russian-Western literary connections or of Russian translation history. Such an approach based on a single angle of analysis and its methodology hardly allowed for treating translations made by women as anything more than data for studying general trends in the development of Russian literature, irrespective of the gender characteristics of those translations and the way(s) they influenced the professional fate of Russian literary women in the eighteenth century and beyond. What follows is an attempt, first, to present a typology of translations by Russian women, viewing them as a professional activity that appeared in a specific cultural context; and second, to highlight the further development of Russian women’s writing as a distinctive professional activity, tying the fate of Russian women writers of later periods to the works and fates of their eighteenth-century predecessors. In other words, the chapter presents invariant characteristics (formal, functional, and aesthetic) of female translation activity that existed in the Russian eighteenth-century literary space, keeping in mind that modern (read: secular) Russian literature in that period was at a very early stage of its development and was

86  Olga Demidova thus greatly dependent on contemporary European literatures, a fact that made translation(s) absolutely vital. The analysis undertaken is based on the following criteria: 1) the role and place of translation in the literary activity of select women; 2) the factors determining their turn to translation; 3) the cultural environment (interaction with family, friendly and literary connections); 4) the genre and linguistic characteristics of the translated texts; 5) the kinds/types of translation (prosaic, poetic; complete, partial; adaptations, etc.) and target audience; 6) whether the translation was done independently, that is, without the help of others; 7) whether the translation was meant for publication; 8) whether the translation was the only one of the source text in question; 9) whether translation was regarded by literary society and the translators themselves as a professional or leisurely activity. For the majority of educated women in eighteenth-century Russia, translation proved to be the shortest and often the only way into literature hence becoming the only possible form of literary activity. Of the 28 women registered in Slovar’s russkikh pisatelei XVIII veka [The Dictionary of Eighteenth-Century Russian Writers], 16 published nothing but translations: Maria Bazilevich (?–?), Evdokia Boltina (1734–?), Ekaterina Voeikova (1756–1824), Varvara Golitsyna (née Engel’gardt, 1752–1815), Ekaterina Golitsyna (1763–1823), Aleksandra Kozlova (?–?), Anna Konovnitsyna (née Korsakova, 1769–1843), Elizaveta Likhareva (1778– 1845), Ekaterina Menshikova (1774–1791), Nadezhda Nikiforova (?–?), Elizaveta Nilova (née Borozdina, ?–?), Maria Orlova (?–?), Ekaterina Sablukova (1777–1846), Sofia Sumarokova (née Kazab (Kazabe), 1764 to after 1837), Elizaveta Tatishcheva (1779–1854), and Ekaterina Shcherbatova (?–?). Nevertheless, these women were known as literary figures and remained in the history of Russian literature exclusively due to their translations, no matter how few in number, how insignificant from a purely artistic point of view, or inadequate their translations might have been. The actual number of women translators must have been much greater, as not all translations were published, quite a few were lost, and, as often as not a translated foreign text was published as the translator’s own original work after some minor adaptation to fit “the Russian mores.” Moreover, in accordance with common practices of the time, a substantial number of translations was published anonymously or signed by a pseudonym, a cryptonym, or by initials only, making it impossible to attribute them to either a man or a woman.

Russian Women Translators 87 Typically, women turning to translation activity belonged to the same literary circles as male literary figures, who were their relatives, acquaintances, and/or disciples; in fact, these men typically “launched” them into literature. As a result, the choice of texts for translation, as well as the translation approach taken, was frequently influenced by a man and/or the literary circle in question. Varvara Golitsyna, for instance, was well acquainted with the famous writers Gavrila Derzhavin and Ivan Krylov (the latter was her husband’s secretary and their children’s tutor since 1797), and Varvara Kniazhnina (née Karaulova; 1774–1842) was the poet Aleksandr Kniazhnin’s wife and, therefore, daughter-in-law of the well-known dramatist Iakov Kniazhnin. Maria (Mar’ia) Sushkova (née Khrapovitskaia; 1752–1803) was the sister of the statesman, writer, poet, and translator Aleksandr Khrapovitskii and the writer, poet, and translator Mikhail Khrapovitskii, as well as mother of the writers Mikhail and Nikolai Sushkov; her brother Aleksandr was her language and literature tutor and later introduced her to Kirill Razumovskii, who in his turn introduced her at court and personally to Catherine the Great. The empress suggested that the young lady turn to translation and offered her a list of books to translate as well as the means to have the translations published. This launched Sushkova’s publications in literary journals, with Mikhail Kheraskov’s Vechera (1772–1773) being one of them. In 1772 she published some translations from French and English and translated Kheraskov’s verse poem Chesmesskii boi [Battle of Chesma] as well as an essay on Russian poetry into French prose as Le combat de Tzesme, poème, avec un discours sur la poésie russe. Incidentally, Kheraskov’s essay is not extant and so exists only in Sushkova’s translation. The translation and accompanying essay contributed greatly to Kheraskov’s European fame. In addition, Sushkova translated and published prose and drama from French,3 English and Italian; as her nephew later recalled, among other things, she made a poetic translation of Petrarch’s Sonnets and a prose translation of Milton’s Paradise Lost, which is the first Russian translation of this work. Unfortunately, these translations, too, are not extant. In addition to Sushkova, Kheraskov and his Masonic circle led at least three other young women to turn to translation: Aleksandra Khvostova, and the sisters Aleksandra and Natalia Magnitskii, who in 1786–1798 contributed to his journal Priiatnoe i poleznoe [The pleasant and the useful]. As a rule, the first translations by women were made for teaching/ learning purposes; in some cases the first translation experience remained the only one; in others, the woman persisted in the activity but her translations were far from adequate and/or artistic; only in rare cases did her skills develop, as evident from one translated text to another, and at times even influenced her own writing. In any case, translations made by women would be edited either by their male tutor or some well-known literary figure, a traditional practice that almost no one questioned.

88  Olga Demidova Another thing tradition presupposed was that every translation would be dedicated to some high-status male figure: a father, an elder brother, a tutor, a husband; a writer or journal editor/publisher; a statesman; or even a member of the Imperial family. Dedications were rather extensive and elaborate, their explicit purpose being “to honor” the addressees, while the implicit one was to justify the translator’s right to this “noble occupation” and guarantee its eventual publication. Maria Bazilevich in the dedication to her translation Novye basni i povesti, s prisovokupleniem nravouchitel’nykh primechanii, sluzhashchikh priatnym i poleznym preprovozhdeniem vremeni. Podarok blagorodno vospityvaiushchemusia iunoshestvu [New fables and stories, supplied with moral notes for the pleasant and useful spending of time. Gift to youth nobly brought up], 1799. Parts 1–2)4 thanked her parents and expressed the hope of giving them pleasure, as little as it might be, with her first endeavor. Elizaveta Chicherina (née Demidova; 1767—?) presented the first edition of her 1792 translation of Christian Fürtegott Gellert’s Geistliche Oden und Lieder (1758), titled Dukhovnye ody i pesni [Spiritual odes and songs], to her parents on the occasion of the New Year, expressing her “deeply felt gratitude for their care for her” and signing it “Your deeply obedient and industrious daughter.” The second edition (1785) was dedicated to His Imperial Highness Paul and Her Imperial Highness Maria “in gratitude for their visit to her parents’ house.” Her second collection of translations, Vremya, neprazdno preprovozhdennoe v chtenii, ili Sobranie poleznykh povestvovanii raznykh pisatelei. Sostavleno devitseiu Elizavetoiu Demidovoi. Tetrad’ [Time not idly passed in reading, or useful tales by different writers, collected by Miss Elizaveta Demidova] (1787), was also dedicated to her “dearest parents.” Nadezhda Nikiforova dedicated her 1792 abridged translation of François Fénelon’s De l’éducation des filles (1687) (O vospitanii devits [On the bringing up of young ladies], 1794) to her father, thanking him for giving her both physical and spiritual life and promising to remain forever deeply respectful and devoted; Varvara Golitsyna dedicated her translation of Barthélemy Imbert’s Les égarements de l’amour, ou lettres de Fanelli et Milfort (Zabluzhdeniia ot liubvi, ili Pis’ma ot Fanelii i Mil’forta [Love’s delusions, or letters of Fanelia and Milfort], 1790) to her husband. In the long dedication published on the first pages of the book, she asked him not to be surprised that she was acting as the translator and publisher of the book and explaining her deed not by vanity or a desire to please society but by the sincere wish to show her love to him and to prove she deserved his love in return. In some cases, translations were dedicated to female relatives, close friends or “sisters in writing.” Thus, Ekaterina Sablukova’s translation of the anonymous French text L’Exercise d’Adelaide (Uprazhnenie Adelaidy [Adelaide’s exercise], 1791) was dedicated to her aunt; Elizaveta Likhareva’s “first endeavor”—the translation of a French novel—to her relative

Russian Women Translators 89 P. Ushakova; Ekaterina Voeikova’s 1781 translation of the story by Louis Charpentier “Lucile, ou la fermière en petite maison” titled Lutsillia, ili arendarka malen’kogo domika, nravouchitel’naia skazochka, perevedena s frantsuzskogo [Lucillia, or the renter of a small home, an edifying tale, translated from the French], was dedicated to her friend, the translator Sharlotta Mikhel’son. The young Maria Orlova dedicated her translation of Susannah Gunning’s novel Barford Abbey (Abbatstvo, ili Zamok Barfordskii [The Abbey or Barford Castle], 1788), made from the French adaptation, to the then well-known translator Elizaveta Nilova, who is addressed as the translator’s “beloved mother and benefactor.” After her parents’ death, Orlova was brought up in Nilova’s family and turned to translation under Elizaveta’s influence; Elizaveta oversaw her daily efforts “in this field of benefit and honor.” The translation of Gunning’s novel was meant to prove that “the humble, ever grateful and obedient pupil” hadn’t disgraced her teacher (Golitsyn 1889, 187). In all the aforementioned examples, the dedication to a high-status person elevated the status of the translator and the translation, making them legitimate and accepted in the literary world, testifying to the translator’s right to belong to it, while dedications to female friends, “teachers” and fellow translators served as a symbol of their mutual equality as members of a community of female translators.5 In the former case, the discourse was constructed along a vertical social axis; in the latter, it was formed along a horizontal professional one, in its distinct gender variant. When the addressee was both a high-status figure and a female friend or professional model (tutor), both types of discourse interacted, thus defining the mode of individual and group professional self-identification, as well as the manner and direction of women’s further advances in the field of literature. As is evident from a substantial number of examples, women translated texts by French, German, English, and Italian authors, mostly of the Enlightenment and Sentimentalist orientation; in a few cases they chose works from earlier periods, folk tales in literary adaptations, anonymous European texts, and rarely—poetic texts from ancient Eastern literatures. Often these were relay translations, made from some intermediary rather than from the original language, which was quite compatible with general translation practices of the period. Poetry and drama might be translated into prose, which did not violate the reigning norms, especially as in many cases the task was educational and didactic rather than artistic and so was considered “more appropriate for the fair sex.” In such instances texts for translation were also didactic, and translations were often not complete: certain fragments were chosen to be adapted for children or teenagers (“the youth”), mostly for classroom reading, and supplied with the translator’s didactic commentaries. For instance, Nilova wrote in her foreword to the translation of a German novel, which was published under the title Prikliucheniia Eduarda Val’sona [Edward Walson’s

90  Olga Demidova adventures], 1790, that it was “meant especially for children just beginning to read.” In addition, translations were often made from famous European textbooks or children’s folk and literary anthologies for purely instructional purposes. As mentioned earlier, translations were usually signed by cryptonyms or published anonymously, with only the original author’s name indicated on the book cover. Last but not least, a translation by a woman was far from always the only or the best one of the foreign book. More often than not, translations by women appeared sometime after translations made by men, which were considered much more artistic and professional. For instance, Pelageia Veliasheva-Volyntseva’s translation of Charles Henri de Longueil’s didactic sentimental drama L’Orphelin anglais. Drame en trois actes en prose appeared under the title Sirota anglinskaia [The English orphan] in 1787, appeared 12 years after Aleksei Golitsyn’s translation titled Angliskii sirota (1775); Ekaterina (Bestuzheva) Svin’ina’s translation of a prose fable, probably by Louis Sebastien Mercier, under the title “Istoriki, basnia” [Stories, a fable] (1795) was preceded by two translations by men (1786, 1788); Elizaveta Tatishcheva’s abridged translation of La Rochefoucauld’s Réflexions, ou sentences et maximes morales (1665) titled Nravouchitel’nye mysli Gertsoga de-la Roshefoko [Didactic thoughts of Duke de la Rochefoucauld] (1798), was published almost two decades after its first one by A. F. Malinovskii (1781) and a decade after the second one signed by the cryptonym “Mr. N. S.” (1788). On the one hand, it should be regarded as evidence of the translation multiplicity principle6 typical of all times. On the other hand, though, it greatly contributed to forming what could be termed a female translation canon, which defined the selection and sources of translated texts (textbooks, anthologies, books for children), the goal and target audience of the translation (children, youth, women), its philosophy, artistic principles, and techniques. In other words, from the functional and pragmatic points of view, these texts in their Russian versions comprised a portion of translated literature that for a long time was marked as “typically female.” It is evident that forewords, detailed and excessively “humble” dedications, cryptonyms, pseudonyms and anonymous publications were masks behind which women made daring attempts to enter a world that was not their own.7 Metaphorically speaking, women tried to “squeeze into” Russian eighteenth-century literature in the same way as middle and lower-class characters had done in French literature a century before them—i.e., “through the back door.” Women were not considered original authors creating authentic literary texts—theirs was a re-creative activity regarded as of “the second order.” Yet, Russian women translators of the first two generations inaugurated a specific female literary (both artistic and aesthetic) canon, which determined the acceptable spheres of female literary activity. This canon rigidly defined a “female” space of rights and prohibitions (the “to dos” and “not to dos”), separating “theirs”

Russian Women Translators 91 (female) from the “not theirs’ ” (male) in the socio-cultural and creative spheres, languages, literary genres, etc. Formally, translation was regarded both by society and by translators themselves as a female “leisure” activity alongside a number of obligatory pastimes of educated women, the list of which was rather rigidly defined by their domestic and social duties. By turning to translation, however, educated women acquired the opportunity to escape this “vicious circle,” entering the male-dominated literary society of the time, thus considerably changing their status in their own and in society’s estimation. The very fact of having her translation published or staged (if it was a play) made the translator officially recognized and her name “visible,” supplying her with a definite socially significant “face” and lending her the symbolic capital necessary for her to aspire to a wider range of social roles, higher status and, finally, to professional recognition. Translation activity opened a way into that part of the outside world that was beginning to function in accordance with professional rules and laws. Those women for whom translation became a more or less permanent occupation obtained experience and learned to treat their occupation as a professional one, demanding not only knowledge of foreign languages and some literary gifts, but also a certain amount of skill, based on genuine interest as well as rigid self-discipline. In this respect it seems possible to regard the activity of these women translators as professional from a social and aesthetic point of view even though it was far from being economically feasible; it did not make them financially independent. It would become possible for a woman to support herself by translation and even make a more or less decent living only in the second half of the nineteenth century, during a period of liberalization when the so-called woman’s question was the subject of much debate (Ol’khovskii 2001, 85). At this time translation turned into one of the major female intellectual professions, giving rise to foreign literature journals, journals for women edited by both men and women (Hammarberg 2007, 83–104), publishing houses headed and owned by women, and—last but not least—the Women’s Translation and Publishing Company (Zhenskaia perevodcheskaia i izdatel’skaia artel’), which functioned in St. Petersburg from 1863 to 1873 and was the first and only professional body of Russian women translators in Russian history (Barenbaum and Kostyleva, 1986, 247–254). Organized by Maria Trubnikova, daughter of the Decembrist Vasilii Ivashev, and Nadezhda Stasova, daughter of the architecht Vasilii Stasov and sister of the writer Vladimir Stasov, “to meet the need of active intellectual activity” felt by educated women (“society women”), it published a substantial number of books for children, novels, and contemporary scholarship in translations. (For the complete list of translations, see Barenbaum 1995, 51–60). Due to the professional recognition resulting in economic independence, on the one hand, and to the growing need for translations of foreign

92  Olga Demidova literature, on the other, the number of women translators grew steadily, and by the first decade of the twentieth century, translation had become an established profession for women of various social classes. True, not all the books translated were masterpieces and, likewise, not all the published translations could boast of their artistic quality. A great number of the former were typical short-lived artifacts of mass literature while far from all women translators managed to become high-status professionals. Nevertheless, the quantitative data alone allows us to propose a typology of the phenomenon. First, one can speak of three distinct groups of women translators depending on what part translation occupied in their literary activities in general. The first and least numerous group consisted of those who did nothing but translate, treating translation as “high art”; for the third group, translation was nothing but one of the various means used to support themselves, while those belonging to the second and most numerous group combined rather successfully translation with their own writing, be it literature, journalism, or criticism. Second, a certain hierarchy among women translators became evident between the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was based on the criteria of success, recognition in the literary world, social and professional status, and demand—i.e., on the very symbolic capital that caused the profession to split into a highly paid professional elite of female translators, who introduced the crème de la crème of foreign literatures to the Russian reading public, and “day-laborers” who did petty translation work for very little money.

Notes 1 The first two biobibliographies compiled by S.V. Russov and M.N. Makarov were published by installments in Damskii zhurnal [The Ladies Journal] in St. Petersburg in the 1830s, to be followed by a number of works of the kind in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, see Mordovtsev 1874; Golitsyn 1889; Ponomarev 1891 (both republished in one volume in Leipzig in 1974); Ledkovsky, Rosenthal and Zirin 1994 (400 names of the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries, 6 women translators of the eighteenth century); Slovar’ russkikh pisatelei XVIII veka 1988, 1999, 2010 (900 names, 40 of them female, 28 women translators); Kalinnikov, P. http//rulex.ru; see also: Göpfert and Fainshtein 1999, 2007. 2 Both Rosslyn’s and Tyulenev’s works are focused on “social conditions and effects of women translators’ work,” their contribution to social and literary processes, and “to what extent translational activities of women were different and/or separate from those of men” (Tyulenev 2011, 77). 3 Sushkova translated five French comedies and operas, four of which were staged and published; Elizaveta Titova, Varvara Miklashevich, and Pelageia Vel’iasheva-Volyntseva also translated French plays, some of which were performed at the Aleksandrinskii Theatre; see: Drammaticheskoi slovar’. . . 1881, 61, 132; and Tyulenev 2011, 85. 4 Most probably, the source for the translation was a new German book for children: Simon Y.-E. Neue Fabeln und Erzählungen zum Unterricht und

Russian Women Translators 93 Vergnügen: Ein Geschenk für die Jugend elder Erziengung. Heilbronn, 1796 and some other German didactic collection (Slovar’ . . . 2006–2011). 5 In this perspective, one can’t but mention the so-called soiuznyi perevod (joint translation) of Ch.M. Dupaty’s Lettres sur l’Italie en 1785 (1788) (Pis’ma ob Italii v 1785godu [Letters about Italy in 1785] made by four women translators: Aleksandra and Natalia Magnitskii, Ekaterina Shcherbatova and Maria Shlitter (mar. Boske), which could be regarded as the first instance of female translators’ collaboration; the translation was published in the journals Priiatnoe i poleznoe (1798) and Ippokrena (1799). 6 The term was introduced by Iurii Levin, see: Levin 1980, 365–372, to name the phenomenon of numerous translations of the same foreign text appearing simultaneously and / or at different periods of time and caused by contemporary aesthetic and artistic demands of the receiving literature on the whole or of the periodical where the translation is published. 7 The only example explicitly negating this tradition was Voeikova’s dedication of her translation of a tale by L. Charpentier’s Lutsillia (1781) to Mikhel’son: “By no means shall I follow my colleagues’ example of proud self-humiliation to abuse their translation in the foreword and ask the reader for pardon hoping in their heart that the latter will contradict them while reading” (Slovar’ . . . 2006–2011), but in fact the translator’s intention is the same as that of her colleagues’, even if worded to look contrary to theirs.

References Barenbaum, Iosif E. 1995. “Zhenshchiny v demokraticheskom knizhnom dele 60–70kh godov XIX veka” [Women in the 1860s–1870s democratic publishing]. In Feminizm i russkaia kul’tura [Feminism and Russian culture], edited by G. Tishkin, 51–60. St. Petersburg: Sankt Peterburgskaia gos. akademiia kul’tury. Barenbaum, Iosif E., and Nina. A. Kostyleva. 1986. Knizhnyi Peterburg: Leningrad [Book Publishing Petersburg: Leningrad]. Leningrad: Lenizdat. Drammaticheskoi slovar’, ili pokazaniia po alfavitu vsekh Rossiiskikh teatral’nykh sochinenii i perevodov, s oznacheniem imen vsekh izvestnykh sochinitelei, perevodchikov i slagatelei muzyki, kotoryia kogda byli predstavleny na teatrakh, i gde, i v kotoroe vremia napechatany. 1881 [Drama dictionary, or an alphabetical index of all Russian theatrical works and translations ever staged with names of all known writers, translators and composers of the music and an indication of the place and time of publication. Reprint of the 1787 edition]. St. Petersburg: izdanie knizhnago magazina “Novago vremeni.” Golitsyn, Nikolai N. 1889. Bibliograficheskii slovar’ russkikh pisatel’nits [Bibliographical Dictionary of Russian Women Writers]. St. Petersburg: Tipografiia V. S. Balasheva i K. Göpfert, Frank, and Mikhail Fainshtein (eds.). 1999. My blagodarny liubeznoi sochinitel’nitse . . .: Proza i perevody russkikh pisatel’nits kontsa XVIII veka [“We Are Grateful to the Kind Author . . .” : Prose and Translations by Russian Women Writers at the End of the 18th Century]. Frauen. Literatur. Geschichte 11. Fichtenwalde: F. K. Göpfert. Göpfert, Frank, and Mikhail Fainshtein (eds.). 2007. Russische Autorinnen von der Mitte bis zum Ausgang des 18. Jahrhunderts. Band 1–2. Fichtenwalde: F. K. Göpfert. Hammarberg, Gita. 2007. “The First Russian Women’s Journals and the Construction of the Reader.” In Women in Russian Culture and Society, 1700–1825,

94  Olga Demidova edited by Wendy Rosslyn and Alessandra Tosi, 83–104. Houndsmills, Basingstoke and Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan. Kalinnikov, Pavel. Russkii biographicheskii slovar’ [Russian Biographical Dictionary]. Available online: http: // rulex. ru Ledkovsky, Marina, Charlotte Rosenthal and Mary Zirin (eds.). 1994. Dictionary of Russian Women Writers. Westport, Connecticut and London: Greenwood Press. Levin, Iurii D. 1980. “K voprosu o perevodnoi mnozhestvennosti” [On the Problem of Translational Multiplicity].” In Klassicheskoe nasledie i sovremennost’ [Classical Heritage and Modernity], edited by D. S. Likhachev, 365–372. Leningrad: Nauka, Leningradskoe otdelenie. Mordovtsev, Daniil. 1874. Russkie zhenshchiny novogo vremeni [Russian Women of Modern Times]. St. Petersburg: Tipografiia O. I. Baksta. Ol’khovskii, Evgenii. 2001. “Zhenskaia izdatelskaia artel’ ” [Women’s Publishing Collective]. In Rossiiskie zhenshchiny i evropeiskaia kul’tura [Russian Women and European Culture], edited by G. A. Tishkin, 85–89. St. Petersburg: SanktPeterburgskoe filosofskoe obshchestvo. Ponomarev, Stepan. 1891. Nashi pisatel’nitsy [Our Women Writers]. St. Petersburg: Tipografiia V. S. Balasheva i K. Preuss, Hilmar. 2008. “Mar’ia Vasil’evna Sushkova (1752–1803): socio-kulturelle und anthropologische Aspekte der Entwicklung einer der ersten russischen Literarinnen im 18. Jahrhundert.” In Anthropologische Konzepte in der russischen Kultur und Literatur (18.—19. Jahrhundert), edited by Andrej A. Faustov and Gabriela Lehmann-Carli, 53–82. Halle (Saale): Martin-Luther Universität Halle-Wittenberg. Rosslyn, Wendy. 2000. Feats of Agreeable Usefulness: Translations by Russian Women 1763–1825. Fichtenwalde: F. K. Göpfert. Slovar’ russkikh pisatelei XVIII veka [Dictionary of Eighteenth-century Russian Writers] I. 1988. Edited by Natalia D. Kochetkova et al. Leningrad: Nauka. Slovar’ russkikh pisatelei XVIII veka [Dictionary of Eighteenth-century Russian writers] II. 1999. Edited by Natalia D. Kochetkova et al. Leningrad: Nauka. Slovar’ russkikh pisatelei XVIII veka [Dictionary of Eighteenth-century Russian Writers] III. 2010. Edited by Natalia D. Kochetkova et al. St. Petersburg: Nauka. Slovar’ russkikh pisatelei XVII veka [Dictionary of Russian Writers of the XVII Century] I—III. 2006–2011. Elektronnye publikatsii Instituta russkoi literatury (Pushkinskogo Doma) RAN Available online: http://lib.pushkinskijdom. ru/Default.aspx?tabid=524 (Accessed 17 February 2017). Tyulenev, Sergey. 2011. “Women-Translators in Russia.” In Women Translators: Geographies, Voices, & Identities, guest edited by José Santaemilia and Louise von Flotow, Monti 13: 75–105.

6 Expressing the Other, Translating the Self Ivan Kozlov’s Translation Genres Yulia Tikhomirova Introduction The evolution of Russian literature in the first quarter of the nineteenth century is widely recognized as key to understanding all further developments of Russian literature. This was also the era of the greatest changes in the literary language brought about by literary (most notably poetic) translations from many European languages. This chapter examines the activities of Russian poet-translators during this pivotal period whose programmatic engagement in cultivating European ideas on the fertile ground of early nineteenth-century Russia not only produced major shifts in the language but also led to significant changes in Russia’s cultural identity, and, paradoxically, helped Russia find its footing through the “internationalization” of its literature. As Iurii Levin writes, “The necessity to walk in step with the flagship European literatures prompted the active acquisition of the achievements and their artistic re-creation on Russian soil” (Levin 1972, 226).1 The fate and further development of Russian literature largely rested with poet-translators of the Russian Romantic school, Vasilii Zhukovskii, first and foremost. Reconceptualizing many dimensions of Western European literary culture (German being the most influential),2 he introduced into Russian literary thought the basic motifs of English graveyard poetry and the concepts of German moral and religious literature. He also inculcated Russian literary culture with Romantic biographism and the idea of “life-creation” (zhiznetvorchestvo), as expressed in his famous formula “Zhizn’ i poeziia odno” [Life and poetry are one], as well as the aesthetics of constant moral self-development, and important aspects of Romantic diction. He made translation into the most productive domain for enriching the national culture, and, consequently, made it the soil out of which Russia’s new national literature would arise.3 The three-decade-long study of the treasures of Zhukovskii’s personal library (which, by a twist of fate, were given to Tomsk State University) reveals the tremendous scale of Zhukovskii’s and his disciples’ translation efforts. The majority of the books in this collection are in foreign

96  Yulia Tikhomirova languages and Zhukovskii’s translations, both interlinear and literary, were often written over the printed texts or as marginal notes.4 A wide array of facts disclosed by the study of Zhukovskii has shown how the cultural codes and the poetic diction that he introduced were embraced by his disciples, fellow poet-translators, who turned them into new linguistic and literary models in their attempts to overcome what they perceived to be Russia’s cultural belatedness when compared with the Western European literatures of the time. Russian Romantic poetry, half-rooted in translation, emerged and flourished in disputes, readings in literary circles and musical-literary salons, and in correspondence between friends. The very nature of Russian Romanticism involved its proponents in a constant, wide-ranging dialogue. Linked to a community where a thought, an idea, a line dropped by one was embraced by others, then carefully rethought, reshaped, and re-expressed, a Romantic poet, when translating, often did not regard it as necessary to indicate the name of the original poet. A collection of poetry by one particular author could easily include a mixture of original works together with translations from a dozen poets, half of whom were not even mentioned by name.

The Context of Kozlov’s Translations One of the most prominent disciples of Zhukovskii’s translation school and, undoubtedly, one of the key authors of early nineteenth-century Russian literature, was Ivan Kozlov. His literary heritage, consisting of a hefty volume of original works along with translations, has attracted researchers for two centuries now for two basic reasons. First, Kozlov’s significance rests on his having undertaken in regard to British poetry that which Zhukovskii undertook with German. He enabled the first extensive encounter of Russian readers with English poetic treasures and sketched the overall picture of English poetry, providing insight into major trends and poets.5 Moreover, Kozlov did an invaluable service for nineteenth-century Russian literature by providing brilliant examples of the new poetic language created by Zhukovskii. Kozlov not only inherited the poetic diction of his teacher but also was indebted to him for the choice of works for translation; indeed, some of his translations were done at the direct request of Zhukovskii. Having gone blind and immobilized by disease by the age of 32, Kozlov learned English from several individuals (but mostly from his daughter), memorized the major part of Byron’s oeuvre, and soon started translating poetry from English, as well as from German, Italian, Polish, and French. Creating poetry, both original and translated, was in many respects a personal act of defying the disease and constant pain that accompanied him the rest of his life. Poetry was his shelter and escape; when lying in bed on a sleepless night, he replayed poetic lines in his head, which seemed

Expressing the Other 97 to bring him some relief.6 A century later, another great Russian translator, Mikhail Lozinskii, would repeat a similar moral feat, sustaining his lifelong devotion to the translation of world literature while enduring a terrible disease (Baer 2010, 164). Writing poetry was also Kozlov’s attempt to escape the poverty into which his illness had plunged his family. With a wife and two children to support, Kozlov was forced to rely on his friends’ and patrons’ efforts to sell his newly written lines to a journal. In this humiliating situation, Kozlov’s wit, poetic talent and aesthetic taste, broad aristocratic education and, above all, his devotion to poetry made him one of the most desirable people to perform the first reading of a newly written poem, or to discuss the latest news of foreign literature; Zhukovskii, Pushkin, as well as the famous poet and translator Petr Viazemskii and the Turgenev brothers,7 were among his most devoted friends.

Translation Genres The term genre is generally used to refer to genres of literature, not translation. The question arises whether it is right to speak of genre varieties in translation when there is a need to denote a greater or lesser degree of distancing from a source text. It is apparent that the existing terms (paraphrase, literal translation, etc.) cannot capture the full range of a Romantic writer’s impulse to self-expression, which leads to almost compulsory infidelity to the source text (sometimes purely declarative, as we will see in the case of Kozlov). The approach to the nomenclature of Romantic translation as translation genres is grounded in the view that genre represents a perspective from which a Romantic author looks upon his text. Adhering to Mikhail Bakhtin’s view of genre, we see it as a means of world-perceiving and world-processing, that is, the projection of the author’s worldview as a sense-building whole, and as a complex system of cognitive and modeling functions. The system of translation genres explored in this study possesses all the traits related to this conception of genre. Especially important here is the category of genre expectations, linked to the principles upon which Kozlov named his texts. While being a faithful disciple of Zhukovskii’s translation school, Kozlov made his own unique way through Russian Romanticism. His very particular attention to the poetics of the titles and subtitles of translations (by far more consistent and intrusive than that of any other of his contemporaries) provides evidence that the poet liked to announce the level of his translations’ fidelity to their source texts. The typology of the headings of the translated texts can be viewed as a well-thoughtout system developed by the translator to indicate the relationship of a translation to its source, which, as we will see, embodied his reaction to the tradition of Romantic translation as a purely self-expressional art.

98  Yulia Tikhomirova My overview of the full range of Kozlov’s translations has shown a marked tendency on the translator’s part to identify the “borrowed” (translated) texts as “more alien” or “more one’s own.” This is explicit at several levels of text poetics. To establish the links between the principles of Kozlov’s naming his texts, his criteria for selecting texts for translation, and the major tendencies in his translation poetics, I undertook a comparative analysis of Kozlov’s translations and their originals. The body of literature published on Kozlov’s translations8 is characterized by a concept that has yet to be reflected in either translation or literary studies: Kozlov’s texts can be organized into groups based on several distinct features. The scope of Kozlov’s translation titles ranges from “Translation,” “Imitation,” and “Free translation” to “From English,” “From Byron,” “From Moore,” etc. They are explicit evidence of Kozlov’s conscious attitude toward translation as a kind of creative activity. The following represents a typology of Kozlov’s main titles and subtitles:9 • texts with an indication of the source text and the original author, presumably aimed at presenting the Russian text as a faithful substitute for the original; • texts that mention the original author and that indicate the imitative nature of the text; • texts with no indication of either the source text or the original author; • texts with detailed information about a source text that has proved to be non-existent.10 The major sources for Kozlov’s translations were lyric poems and fragments of narrative poems; only once did he attempt to translate a long narrative poem—Byron’s The Bride of Abydos. His lifelong adherence to fragmentary translation was one of the defining traits of his oeuvre. It was totally in the aesthetics of Romanticism to take a part for the whole, to see Eternity in an instant, and behold the Universe in a wealth of instances. Also, as Monica Greenleaf puts it, “ ‘Fragmentariness’ and ‘inexplicitness’ (nedoskazannost’) were accepted as key ingredients in a Romantic poetics that exercised the imaginative participation of the reader” (Greenleaf 1994, 2). Thus a literary fragment, whether translated or original, could serve to express such an aesthetic position. While Kozlov generally followed the reigning Romantic paradigm, there were two features that set him apart from his contemporaries. First, his commitment to translating fragments outlived the general tendency, when the move toward longer narratives, and ultimately, toward prose, had already taken hold. Second, Romantic “vagueness” was not applicable in Kozlov’s case. A tendency to over-explicitness (sometimes his translated texts became twice as long as their originals)

Expressing the Other 99 displayed Kozlov’s striving to overcome nedoskazannost’, or inexpressibility, by creating a complete little universe out of the translated piece, thus making it his own. In the case of Kozlov’s fragmentary translations, the principles underlying the choices of excerpts for translation were very similar to the principles underlying his selection of lyric poems: whatever did not coincide with Kozlov’s worldview could be easily omitted from the passage; thus a translation could be dissociated from its “environment” so as not to contain meanings that did not belong to the aesthetic system of the translator. Sometimes this very omission, even along with a quite faithful translation, was quite enough to turn a piece of foreign poetry into a complete and cohesive Russian poem. The best-known examples here are Kozlov’s “Romans” [Romance] (1823), the translation of an excerpt from Sir Thomas Moore’s “Lalla Rookh,” and “Dobraia noch” [Good night] (1824), which is a translation of a fragment from the first canto of Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. Both poems were set to music, becoming very popular Russian songs. A brief mention should be made of Kozlov’s selection criteria in regard to the material for translation. Throughout his life Kozlov displayed a consistent preference for Byron’s works, both short lyric poems and fragments. Kozlov’s translations from Byron can be viewed as a large lyric cycle, which I have conventionally named “Kozlov’s Byron.” The personalities, creative impulses and poetic principles of Kozlov and Byron could not have been more alien to each other, and so it is doubtful whether the Russian poet could have rendered Byron into Russian more or less accurately.11 The character of Kozlov’s poetry was at odds with Byronic passion. Aside from a few cases when Kozlov chose and translated texts by Byron that completely coincided with his own worldview, the overall result was that of distorting Byron’s originals. The melancholy that sometimes could be felt in Byron’s poetry was only one of the many aspects of Byron’s polyphonic universe. However, Kozlov rigorously assembled those instances of melancholy and created his own canon of Byron’s work. Moreover, all the other authors translated by Kozlov came to resemble one another in Kozlov’s translations, thus creating a single cycle from a collection of different poets. The question of the translator’s objectives arises here. Let us remember the overall character of Byron’s reception in early nineteenth-century Russia. Russian Byronism was a unique phenomenon in the evolution of world literature. The atmosphere in the pre-Decembrist country predetermined quite a one-sided view of Byron’s works, and a very similar reception of his personality.12 Russian progressive society made Byron a symbol of resistance and political struggle. The truth about Byron, as it was, with his scandalous love affairs and numerous adventures, proved

100  Yulia Tikhomirova distracting and even pernicious in this context, and everything that disagreed with the heroic image was rejected.13 Resisting this tendency, Kozlov ventured to re-examine Byron’s personality in his own way, returning Byron, the man, to the Russian reader. Now let us examine more closely the typology of Kozlov’s translations.

An Overview of Kozlov’s Translation Genres The first group—texts with an indication of the source text and the original author—is made up of the complete and fragmentary translations that were evidently aimed at assuring Russian readers that this was the true Byron (or another foreign author). This group includes “Noch’ v zamke Lary” [The night in Lara’s castle] (1827), “Pri grobnitse Tsetsilii M.” [At the tomb of Cecilia M.] (1828), “Iavleniie Francheski” [The appeareance of Francesca] (1829), and “Bairon v Kolizee” [Byron in the Coliseum] (1834), among others. Kozlov did not leave many paratexts that straightforwardly presented the rationale for his translations, but most probably such translations were made with the purpose of enlightening his readers.14 In several instances, this motive appears very clear, while the fragment from the fourth canto of Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage titled “Bairon v Kolizee” was translated by Kozlov at Zhukovskii’s request or suggestion (Tikhomirova 2012, 43). Several important implications arise from the fact that these translations were made to present an original author to Russian readers. First, refashioning a fragment from a narrative poem into a short lyric poem, the translator could not but assign the features of a Russian Romantic poetic genre to the translated text. Such a strategy of genre domestication ended up creating the first poetic myth about English literature: translated poems and fragments represented a system of overwhelmingly Russian Romantic poetic genres, canons for which had been established by Zhukovskii (a Russian Romantic ballad, a song, a friendly epistle, etc.). A comparative analysis makes the characteristics of these Russian translation genres quite apparent. The basis for the text transformations was Kozlov’s feeling that the original text or the fragment under translation possessed features of some Russian Romantic genre. “Iavleniie Francheski. Iz Osady Korinfa Lorda Bairona” [The appearance of Francesca. From The Siege of Corinth by Lord Byron] (1829) is one conspicuous example. There are quite a few differences in content and changes in imagery in this Russian translation, revealing the contours of a Russian Romantic ballad, evident in the tremendous rise in suggestiveness, in the intensity of the conflict, and in the degree of confusion in the lyric hero’s soul.15 At the textual level this is, first and foremost, expressed in the number of questions asked by Kozlov’s lyric

Expressing the Other 101 hero, who longs to penetrate the essence of what is happening. Compare the following passages: “What did that sudden sound bespeak?” (Byron 1816, 33) “A zvuk tikho veial; kakoi ot chego?” [But the sound was spreading; of what kind? from where?]; “As those thin fingers, long and white, Froze through his blood by their touch that The feverish glow of his brow was gone [. . .]” (Byron 1816, 35) “I pal’tsy dlinnye u nei Tak tonki, mramora belei,— A vmerzli v krov’ . . . i dlia chego V tu noch tak strashny dlia nego?” [And her fingers are long/And thin, whiter than marble,/But frozen into blood . . . but why/On that night are they so scary for him?] Byron: “Hath she sunk in the earth, or melted in air? He saw not, he knew not; but nothing is there.” (Byron 1816, 38) Kozlov: “Chto zh? V zemliu skrylasia ona Il’ v tonkii par obraschena? I kak chto tvoritsia, zachem, dlia chego? Ne vidit, ne znaiet, no net nikogo!” (Kozlov 1960, 178) [So what? Into the earth has she gone / Or turned into a thin steam? / And how and what is happening, and for what? / He does not see, does not know, and there is no one!]

Byron: Kozlov: Byron: Kozlov:

Although the last line of Kozlov’s translation is a very close rendering of Byron’s original line, we cannot but note that this is where Kozlov choses to end the poem, thus, making it the climax of his translated poem. Such comprehensive Not-Knowing (Non-Seeing, Non-Understanding) of moral outlaws, as opposed to scrutinizing and listening attentively to the world, is a defining characteristic of the Russian Romantic ballad (Ianushkevich 1985, 93), the canon for which was elaborated by Zhukovskii. According to that canon, the lost soul that deliberately ignores universal laws of being is doomed to die. Another example is a fragment of a narrative poem that becomes a song with all the properties of this Russian Romantic genre. Such, for instance, are “Dobraia noch” [Good night] (1824), a fragment of Byron’s 1st canto from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, as well as “Stansy. Iz Morskogo razboinika Lorda Bairona” [Stanzas. From The Corsair by Lord Byron] (1837). These fragments are song installments in the source narratives as well, but under Kozlov’s pen they turn into vivid specimens of Russian Romantic song writing with all its inherent characteristics.

102  Yulia Tikhomirova In “Stansy. Iz Morskogo razboinika Lorda Bairona” [Stanzas. From The Corsair of Lord Byron], for example, Kozlov, while carefully preserving Byron’s lyric plot, fills the Russian text with Russian Romantic formulas: serdste tomnoye [languid heart] , ne tmit ee toska [grief cannot quench it], vo mrake unyvaia [drooping in the dark], etc. (Kozlov 1960, 289). But the major changes occur at the rhythmical and intonational levels: the translation is “stretched” by the iambic hexameter against Byron’s iambic pentameter to make three- and four-syllable singable words fit at the end of each line: bez-mol-viu [stillness], gro-bo-va-ia [tomb], u-ny-vaia [drooping], mol’-bo-iu [pleading], sle-zo-iu [tear] etc. (Kozlov 1960, 289). This, together with other shifts in poetics, adds explicit singable properties to the translation and brings it closer to a Russian song. The second result of Kozlov’s striving to represent Byron’s poetry to Russian readers involved the myth surrounding Byron’s personality. The most significant example here is Kozlov’s translation of Byron’s “Fare thee well, and if forever . . .”, which Kozlov titled “Prosti. Elegiia Lorda Beirona, na razlucheniie suprugov” [Farewell. Elegy of Lord Byron, to the parting of spouses] (1823). Through the use of such detailed titles and subtitles, the Russian translator attempts to convince the reader that this was Byron whom they were reading in Russian. Comparative analysis, however, clearly indicates that the Russian text’s modality has little to do with Byron’s text. Although the lyric subject matter is preserved (the parting of the two once in love), Kozlov’s translation represents Byron’s lyric hero as miserable and suffering immense pain, pleading for forgiveness and desiring reconciliation. While Byron’s lyric hero declares: “Still thine own its life retaineth—/ Still must mine, though bleeding, beat” (Bairon 2004, 360), Kozlov’s lyric hero complains: “Tvoe zh to chuvstvo sokhraniaet/Udel zhe moi—stradat’, liubit” [While your heart retains the same feeling/My fate is to suffer and to love] (Kozlov 1960, 79). And so, while Kozlov leads the Russian reader to see the translation as a faithful representation of the original poem, Byron never in his poems ask for foregiveness, even when deeply hurt and heartbroken. The second large group of translations—texts that mention the original author and that indicate the imitative nature of the text—consists of poems that were given the following specifications in their titles: vol’nyi perevod [free translation], podrazhanie [imitation of], podrazhatel’nyi perevod [imitative translation], and vol’noe podrazhanie [free imitation]. Among these belong the following: “Ne na zemle ty obitaesh’ ” [You do not dwell on earth] (1828), which has lost its subtitle “Podrazhanie Baironu” [Imitation of Byron] in contemporary editions but had it in Kozlov’s lifetime; “Iz Baironova Don-Zhuana. Vol’noie podrazhaniie” [From Byron’s Don Juan. Free imitation] (1829), “Iz Dzhiaura. Podrazhatel’nyi perevod” [From Giaour. Imitative translation] (1838). At first sight, the translator himself predetermined his reader’s perception

Expressing the Other 103 by suggesting the imitative character of the translation or by deliberately departing from the original content or style. But what comparative analysis actually has shown is that nothing is as simple in Kozlov’s case. There is the paradoxical fact that some translations marked as “free” by the translator himself show quite a high level of fidelity, sometimes exceeding the equivalence of his “translations proper.” The question then arises as to what this could mean for the author to mark what is, in fact, a quite faithful translation as “free.” A most conspicuous example that sheds some light on this question is Kozlov’s “K Tirze” [To Thyrza] (1828), a translation of Byron’s elegy “To Thyrza.” The translator supplied it with the subtitle “Vol’noie podrazhanie Lordu Baironu” [A free imitation of Lord Byron], but comparative analysis shows that the texts are very close, both semantically and stylistically. Therefore, by naming his translation “a free imitation” (in fact, twice indicating its imitative character), the poet-translator clearly did not intend to identify it as “far from the original.” Moreover, such a marker in this context did not possess any evaluative connotation. Basically, it marked the positive personal involvement of the Romantic poet-translator, revealing the affinity of the translator’s aesthetic principles to those of the original author. Vol’nost’ [freedom] as a key concept, an ideal among the Romantics bore a much more positive connotation among Kozlov’s contemporary readers than it did and would in other cultural contexts. Indeed, remembering the many Romantic poems bearing vol’nost’ in the title, including Pushkin’s well-known ode “Vol’nost’,” we understand that Kozlov’s subtitles vol’noe podrazhanie [free imitation] and vol’nyi perevod [free translation] placed his pieces within a context that suggested the great importance of the Romantic impulse toward self-expression. Convincing proof of this can be found in Kozlov’s original poetry. Sending his recently completed translation “K Tirze” [To Thyrza] to Anna Olenina, his friend and companion, Kozlov wrote a dedication, which in contemporary volumes appears as a separate poem “K A.A. Oleninoi. Pri posylke elegii ‘K Tirze’ ” [To A. A. Olenina. Upon sending the elegy “To Thyrza”]. This short poem renders the translator’s aesthetic standpoint as expressed in poetic form. The third quatrain of the dedication runs like this: Ne setui; no, uslysha pen’ie Razbitykh bureiu plovtsov, Blagoslavi uedinen’ie Tvoih Priiutinskikh lesov! [Do not complain; but hearing the singing Of rowers crushed by the storm Bless the retreat Of your Priiutinskii woods!] (Kozlov 1960, 138)

104  Yulia Tikhomirova It is clear who the first “rower” is. It is, of course, Byron, the author of the translated elegy. But there are obviously two people in the dedication. The other is Kozlov himself. The two poets are equally important. Moreover, Kozlov marks himself powerfully with the image of a “rower without oars,” which he often uses to refer to himself. Being blind and lame, he consistently compares his life in his original poetry to a shipwreck on a stormy sea, as, for instance, in his early poetic epistle “K Svetlane” [To Svetlana] (1821): Khotia neumolimyi rok Obremenil menya toskoiu I moi besparusnyi chelnok Razbit svirepoiu volnoiu [. . .] [Although the inexorable doom Encumbered me with anguish And my skiff without a sail Was crushed by a furious wave . . .] (Kozlov 1960, 55) The translator’s indication that the translation is an “imitation” in the case of the elegy “K Tirze” does not suggest that the translation is somehow unfaithful. To the contrary, Kozlov’s description of a translation as “free” indicates the individual creative character of this particular textual adaptation, and represents the original author not as a creator but as a coauthor. This enables the translator to join an artistic dialogue rather than rendering the original monologue. The third group of translations—texts with no indication of either the source text or the original author—consists of poems that bear no sign of being translations. They are distinguished by a complete absence of any indication of the original author or the original work. To this group belong Campbell’s “The Soldier’s Dream,” translated as “Son ratnika” [The Dream of a warrior], Thomas Moore’s “The Lake of Dismal Swamp,” titled by Kozlov as “Ozero mertvoi nevesty” [The lake of the dead bride],16 and Byron’s passage from the fourth canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, translated as the poetic epistle to a friend “P.F. Bulk-Polevu” [To P. F. Bulk-Polev].17 By consciously cutting off any associations with the source text and applying the systemic indicators of traditional Russian Romantic genres, Kozlov made these texts into outstanding specimens of Russian Romantic poetry. But it is not only the titles that eradicate any sign of the original author, suggesting that the translator had no intention of representing the original to Russian readers. Byron’s passage served as a starting point for the unfolding of Kozlov’s own poetic themes. Compare the beginning of Kozlov’s poem and Byron’s original lines: Byron:

But ever and anon of griefs subdued There comes a token like a scorpion’s sting,

Expressing the Other 105

Scarce seen, but with fresh bitterness imbued; And slight withal may be the things which bring Back on the heart the weight which it would fling Aside for ever [. . .] (Byron 2009, 176)

Kozlov:

Drug, ty prav: khotia poroi, Dostigaia bed zabven’ia, My, v grudi stesniv volnen’ia, Dremlem tomnoiu dushoi, Nevznachai v mechte vozdushnoi Otzyv prezhnego sletit, I predmet nam ravnodushnyi Pamiat’ serdtsa ozhivit. (Kozlov 1960, 146)



[Friend, you are right: although sometime, Reaching oblivion of woes, We, hiding unrest in our chest, Dreaming in our languishing soul, Suddenly in an airy dream An echo of the past will come down on us, And a subject we are indifferent to Will revive the memory of the heart.]

Byron’s attitude toward the phenomenon of remembrance (which he treated as soul-deadening) was very different from that of the Russian Romanticists, who viewed it as a source of inspiration. This was especially true for Kozlov, as the blind poet’s memories were almost the only source of his inspiration and moral strength. Trying to apply his own understanding to Byron’s original lines made the translation an odd reflection of several different worldviews: Byron’s, Kozlov’s and Zhukovskii’s. Having been transformed in this way, the poem lost any association with the original and so was included in Russian literature as a poem of a deeply Russian character. The fourth group—texts with detailed information about a source text that has proved to be non-existent—is represented by a single poem in Kozlov’s oeuvre, which stands out for its especially long and detailed title: “Stikhi, napisannye Lordom Baironom v al’bom molodoi ital’ianskoi grafini za neskol’ko dnei do ot’ezda svoego v Missolongi” [Verse written by Lord Byron to an album of some young Italian Countess a few days before his departure to Missolonghi]. The existence of Byron’s text in English has not been confirmed in spite of the efforts of several generations of researchers. Thus, Nikolai Bakhtin supposed that the English “source” never existed (qtd. in Kozlov 1960, 453). This remarkable sample of pseudotranslation, nevertheless, bespeaks of Kozlov’s approach to translation as a life-creating art. The only acceptable reason behind this pseudotranslation is that the Russian poet sought to collect within this short piece all the most conspicuous (from his point of view) features of his beloved

106  Yulia Tikhomirova Byronic poetry.18 And so, this is not just a case of pseudotranslation, but a case of metatranslation, which brings together the most characteristic features of Byron’s style as viewed by Kozlov. This type of text is evidently the ultimate manifestation of the translator’s myth of Byron. The Russian poet created, on Byron’s behalf, a Russian piece that embodied the features that Kozlov deemed to be most representative of Byron’s aesthetics and poetics.

Conclusion The case study of Ivan Kozlov’s translations has shown the diverse ways in which historical poetics can help us understand the “life-building” (zhiznestroitel’nyi) potential of a Romantic author’s creativity. The approach to translation as a means and facility for “life-building” and as an aesthetic text is such a fundamental feature in Kozlov’s case that the whole body of his creative works can be read as a consistent metatext with two major, overlapping cycles, both dealing with the question of authorship. The first cycle emerges around the personality of the translated author (Byron); the second is associated with the personality of the translator himself, his individual perception of art and expressiveness. Kozlov’s resistance to the dominant principles of Romantic translation as a purely self-expressive art bore a transitional character. This transitional character often made itself felt in the translator’s inability to reconcile the contradictions between the Romantic aesthetics of translation and his wish to bring a foreign author closer to the Russian readership, which ultimately led him to create a translation myth. Kozlov’s translation oeuvre showed the two ultimate manifestations of the authorship question: the one striving to generate a true and faithful representation of a foreign author’s creation for the Russian reader, the other creating a Russian work on behalf of the foreign poet. While overtly acknowledging the revolutionary character of Byron’s creativity (which is shown in Kozlov’s original poetry, for instance, in the lyric narrative “Beiron” [Byron] of 1824, written upon Byron’s death in Greece during the fight for its independence), Kozlov covertly resisted the whole paradigm of Byron’s perception in pre-and post-Decembrist Russia. By undermining Byron’s generally accepted, almost purely revolutionary— i.e., political image—Kozlov was able to create another Byron: Byron— the graveyard poet, Byron—the meek and suffering lover, Byron—the elegy writer, Byron—the composer of song and romance, Byron—the ballad creator. Of course, this is all about Kozlov himself and his assertion of an affinity between two poetic souls—so different and yet so close.

Notes 1 All translations in this article are mine unless otherwise indicated. 2 For more on German influence on Zhukovskii, see Nikonova 2015. 3 For more on Zhukovskii’s translation activities and his role in Russian culture, see Cooper 2011.

Expressing the Other 107 4 Zhukovskii’s library is described in three volumes of Biblioteka Zhukovskogo v Tomske; see Kanunova and Ianushkevich 1978–1988. 5 Kozlov translated 23 pieces from Byron, six from Thomas Moore, two from Robert Burns, two from Walter Scott, two from Shakespeare, two from Wordsworth, one from Charles Wolf, one from Thomas Campbell. 6 The life of Ivan Kozlov is described in detail in Afanas’ev 1977. 7 The Turgenev brothers: the historian, statesman, and publicist Aleksandr Ivanovich, the economist and Decembrist Nikolai Ivanovich and the diplomat Sergei Ivanovich, were among the most progressive intelligentsia of Decembrist Russia; acquainted with Pushkin, they often were the first to welcome his new writings. 8 For more on Kozlov’s poetics and style, see Glikman 1960; Barrat 1972; Levin 1972; Zhukovskii 1985. 9 This classification together with some other statements has already been presented in Tikhomirova 2007. 10 Such texts are referred to as pseudotranslations; Gideon Toury described them in his Descriptive Translation Studies—and Beyond (2012). For more on pseudotranslations, see also Robinson 2001. 11 Views of Kozlov’s achievements differ. Leighton, for instance, praises him: “Great poets deserve great poet-translators. Donne, Eliot, and Frost deserved Joseph Brodsky. Byron deserved Zhukovskii and Kozlov. Shakespeare deserved Pushkin” (Leighton 2006, 339). 12 The Decembrists and liberal intelligentsia were using cultural and historical references in their writings (Greek fight for independence and Byron’s death in Greece in 1821, for instance) and translations from European languages to advance ideas of national liberation. 13 For more on the Russian Byronism, see Maslov 1915; Levin 1972; Zverev 2004, etc. 14 Kozlov burned his diaries after 1825 in fear that they would bring harm to his family. Nevertheless, there are a few letters left and made available to public through the publication of Sivers (1951). 15 A study of the properties of Russian Romantic ballads was done by Ianushkevich (1985, 80–94). Exploring the system of Zhukovskii’s ballads of 1808– 1814, the researcher emphasizes “the psychological exaltation of ballad characters” (Ianushkevich 1985, 93), which was the expression of Zhukovskii’s aesthetics of “theatre of passions” (Ianushkevich 1985, 80). By increasing the degree of suggestiveness and the emotional tone of ballads, Zhukovskii showed “human passion at the verge of human possibilities” (Ianushkevich 1985, 88). Following Zhukovskii, Kozlov introduced this quality into those translated texts that he made into ballads. 16 That this is a translation was discovered by Girivenko (1984). 17 The fact of translation was revealed only in early twentieth century (Eiges 1935, 746). 18 Robinson explains: “Generally speaking, that is, a pseudotranslation might be defined as a work, whose status as ‘original’ or ‘derivative’ is, for whatever social or textual reason, problematic” (Robinson 2001, 183). Contrarily, Kozlov had no such reasons not to fail to mark the poem; he did it intentionally and created a poem on behalf of Byron.

References Afanas’ev, Viktor V. 1977. Zhizn’ i lira [Life and lyre]. Moscow: Detskaia Literatura.

108  Yulia Tikhomirova Baer, Brian J. 2010. “Literary Translation and the Construction of a Soviet Intelligentsia.” In Translation, Resistance, Activism, edited by Maria Tymoczko, 149–167. Amherst: Massachusetts University Press. Bairon, Dzhordzh G. [Byron, George G.]. 2004. Izbrannaia lirika [Selected poems]. Edited by Aleksei M. Zverev. Moscow: Raduga. Barratt, Glynn R. V. 1972. I. I. Kozlov: The Translations from Byron. Berne and Frankfurt/M: Lang. Byron, George G. 1816. The Siege of Corinth: A Poem: Parisina: A Poem. New York, NY: Van Winkle and Wiley. Byron, George G. 2009. Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. Auckland: The Floating Press. Cooper, David L. 2011. “Vasilii Zhukovskii as Translator and the Protean Russian Nation.” In Contexts, Subtexts and Pretexts: Literary Translation in Eastern Europe and Russia, edited by Brian J. Baer, 55–77. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Eiges, Iosif R. 1935. “K perevodam I. Kozlova iz Bairona [To Kozlov’s translations from Byron].” In Zvenia: Sborniki materialov i dokumentov po istorii literatury, iskusstva i obshchestvennoi mysli XIX veka [Links: Collections of Materials and Documents on the History of Literature, Art, and Social Thought of the 19th Century], edited by Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich, 745–748. Moscow and Leningrad: Academia. Girivenko, Andrei N. 1984. “Otrazhenie tvorchestva Tomasa Mura v russkoi literature pervoi treti XIX veka” [The reflection of Thomas Moore’s works in Russian literature of the first third of the 19th century]. Izvestiia AN SSSR: Seriia literatury i iazyka 43 (6): 537–543. Glikman, Isaak D. 1960. “I. I. Kozlov.” In Kozlov, Ivan: Polnoe sobranie stikhotvorenii, edited and commented by Isaak Glikman, 5–51. Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel’. Greenleaf, Monica. 1994. Pushkin and Romantic Fashion: Fragment, Elegy, Orient, Irony. Stanford: Standford University Press. Ianushkevich, Aleksandr S. 1985. Etapy i problemy tvorcheskoi evoliutsii V. A. Zhukovskogo [The stages and issues of creative evolution of V. A. Zhukovskii]. Tomsk: Izdatel’stvo Tomskogo universiteta. Kanunova, Faina Z., Aleksandr S. Ianushkevich et al. (eds.). 1978–1988. Biblioteka Zhukovskogo v Tomske [The library of Zhukovskii in Tomsk] I—III. Tomsk: Izdatel’stvo Tomskogo universiteta. Kozlov, Ivan I. 1960. Polnoe sobraniie stikhotvorenii [Full collection of poems]. Edited by Isaak Glikman. Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel’. Leighton, Lauren. 2006. “Pushkin and Problems of Translation.” In The Pushkin Handbook, edited by David M. Bethea, 334–351. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Levin, Iurii D. 1972. “O russkom poeticheskom perevode v epokhu romantizma [About Russian poetic translation in the age of romanticism].” In Rannie romanticheskie veianiia: Iz istorii mezhdunarodnykh sviazei russkoi literatury [Early Romantic Wafts: From the History of International Links of Russian Literature], edited by Pavel M. Alekseev, 246–259. Leningrad: Nauka. Maslov, Vasilii N. 1915. Nachal’nyi period baironizma v Rossii [The early period of byronism in Russia]. Kiev: Tipografiia Imperatorskogo Universiteta sv. Vladimira AO i pech. i izd. dela N.T. Korchak-Novitskogo.

Expressing the Other 109 Nikonova, Natal’ia E. 2015. Zhukovskii i nemetskii mir [Zhukovskii and the german world]. Moscow, Saint-Petersburg: Alians-Archeo. Robinson, Douglas. 2001. “Pseudotranslation.” In The Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, edited by Mona Baker and Kirsten Malmkjaer, 183– 185. London and New York: Routledge. Sivers, A. 1951. “Ivan Kozlov: Pis’ma [Ivan Kozlov: Letters].” In Zvenia: Sborniki materialov i dokumentov po istorii literatury, iskusstva i obshchestvennoi mysli XIX veka [Links: Collections of materials and documents on the history of literature, art, and social thought of the 19th century] IX, edited by Aleksei Dubovikov, compiled by Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich, 469–486. Moscow and Leningrad: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’svo kul’turno-prosvetitel’noi literatury. Tikhomirova, Yulia A. 2007. “Zhanrovoe svoeobrazie russkogo romanticheskogo perevoda [Genre peculiarities of Russian romantic translation].” Tomsk State University Journal 305: 20–22. Tikhomirova, Yulia A. 2012. “Obrazy Baironovskoi Italii v poeticheskikh perevodakh I. I. Kozlova” [Images of Byron’s Italy in Poetic translations of I.I. Kozlov]. Tomsk State University Journal 357: 41–47. Toury, Gideon. 2012. Descriptive Translation Studies: And Beyond. 2nd expanded Edn. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Zhukovskii, Vasilii. 1985. “O stikhotvoreniiakh I.I. Kozlova” [On the Verses of I.I. Kozlov]. In V.A. Zhukovskii—kritik [V.A. Zhukovskii—Critic], edited by Iurii M. Prozorov, 168–171. Moscow: Sovetskaia Rossiia. Zverev, Aleksei M. 2004. “Bairon i russkaia poeziia.” In Bairon, Dzhordzh G. [Byron, George G.]. Isbrannaia lirika [Selected poems], edited by Aleksei M. Zverev, 19–51. Moscow: Raduga.

7 Charles Dickens in Nineteenth-Century Russia Literary Reputation and Transformations of Style Marina Kostionova When texts are transferred from their original culture to a foreign one, the literary reputations of their authors are transplanted too, undergoing inevitable transformations. In this situation of cultural transfer, translation works as a powerful means of shaping and re-shaping the literary reputation of an author. As the author becomes a part of the receiving culture along with the translated texts themselves, translation acts as a means of forming, or, to use the term of André Lefevere and Susan Bassnett (1998), constructing this author’s image or reputation. Lefevere defines translation, together with literary criticism, schoolbooks, encyclopedias, and other literary institutions, as the rewriting of a text and refraction of its author’s image (Lefevere 2000). This refraction, Lefevere states, is performed under a number of socio-cultural constraints, such as the dominant aesthetic values and norms of the receiving culture, the publishing strategies, and the general political context. One of the productive ways of exploring how the translation changes, undermines, or reinforces literary reputations is to compare different translations of the same text over time, taking into account the historical and cultural contexts in which they were created. As argued by Lefevere and Bassnett, A comparison of original and translation will not only reveal the constraints under which translators have to work at a certain time and in a certain place, but also the strategies they develop to overcome, or at least work around those constraints. This kind of comparison can, therefore, give the researcher something like a synchronic snapshot of many features of a given culture at a given time. (Lefevere and Bassnett 1998, 6) By identifying and comparing translators’ strategies (repeating patterns and regularities in translators’ decisioni-making), then placing them against the cultural background of their time to discover the values, norms, and beliefs behind these strategies, we can learn more about how literary reputations are shaped through translation.

Charles Dickens in Russia 111 The Russian translations of Charles Dickens made in the nineteenth century provide a very representative case for this kind of research. Dickens is one of the European writers most deeply acculturated in Russia, widely read and even more widely known by Russians of all ages and educational levels. He has influenced the works of many Russian writers, such as Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Leskov, and Turgenev, to name a few. Dickens, who was first introduced in Russia as a soon-to-be-forgotten entertainer in 1838, became a generally acknowledged classic soon after his death in 1870—a status that Dickens retains to this day. Numerous press articles, critical works and biographies provide us with a wealth of information regarding the transformation of his reputation in nineteenthcentury Russia. Most of his novels were translated into Russian multiple times. In fact, it was not uncommon for two translations to appear simultaneously in different magazines, as publishing houses competed to be the first to present a new novel by Dickens to the Russian reader.1 When viewed in their cultural context, these translations can be divided into three groups, each of which correlates with a shift in Dickens’s reputation and is characterized by a specific translation approach (the fashion-driven one, the one based on creative principles pertaining to the “Natural school,” and the “canonizing” one). In what follows we will dwell on only one aspect of these approaches—namely, the transformation of Dickens’s language and style.

Dickens as a Fashionable Writer and Entertainer: 1830–1840s The first Russian translations of The Pickwick Papers followed almost immediately on the enormous success of the novel in Britain. The first to take an interest in the fashionable English humorist in Russia were the monthly literary magazines managed by the bookseller Aleksandr Smirdin, such as Syn Otechestva [Son of the Fatherland] and Biblioteka dlia chteniia [The Library for Reading], which saw their task as educating readers by entertaining them and by publishing news from Europe and Russia on fashion, the economy, politics, art, and so on. When mentioning Dickens, these magazines tended to focus on his commercial success rather than on the artistic value of his works. For example, Biblioteka dlia chteniia in 1838 published an excited note on Dickens, measuring the quality of his work by the number of copies sold: If you want to read a really good work of foreign literature, read Pickwick Club, by Boz (Dickens): this book will survive the nineteenth century and is worthy of the enormous success it has achieved in England, where more than 40,000 copies of it were sold.2 (Biblioteka dlia chteniia 1838, 101)

112  Marina Kostionova The newspaper Severnaia pchela [Northern Bee] notes that Dickens had lots of imitators, that is, he had become fashionable abroad (Severnaia pchela 1839, 119). The reviewers attribute Dickens’s popularity to his comic talent, lively scenes from everyday (“low”) life, his ability to evoke genuine emotions, his easily recognizable characters, and his adventure plots (Literaturnye pribavleniia k Russkomy Invalidu 1838, 680; Otechestvennye zapiski 1839, 95). Magazines like Syn Otechestva and Biblioteka dlia chteniia in the late 1830s were trying to create a vogue for Dickens in Russia, as having a fashionable writer in the repertoire helps to attract subscribers. There was even a ready model for rewriting Dickens as a fashionable belletrist: Paul de Kock, the French novelist already famous in Russia. The public liked him for his comic scenes, recognizable characters and stereotypically “novelistic” but intriguing plots. As a popular writer, de Kock was not highly valued among literary connoisseurs and professional critics, and the same was true for Dickens. In 1839, Syn Otechestva published an article by Philarète Chasles in which Dickens’s novels are called a symptom of the decline of English literature (Syn Otechestva 1839, 28). This fits well into the reputation of Dickens as a fashionable and popular belletrist: what is liked by the crowd cannot be true art. Even the most favorable reviewers placed Dickens among the authors of adventure novels for the undemanding reader, such as de Kock, William Harrison Ainsworth, and Frederick Marryat. At that time two Russian translations of Pickwick Papers appeared, both very much abridged: the anonymous translation in Syn Otechestva (Syn Otechestva 1838) and the translation by Vladimir Solonitsyn in Biblioteka dlia chteniia (Biblioteka dlia chteniia 1840a and 1840b). Both translators transform the style of the novel radically, following the laws of literary fashion. They focus on the engaging plot, renaming one of the translations “Adventures of Pickwick and his friends” and highlighting the action by condensing the text and clearing it of all stylistic embellishments. The translators preferred situational comedy over language-based humor and subtle exposition of character through speech and subtext; they refrained from rendering any stylistic peculiarities (repetitions, rhythm, and defamiliarizing comparisons) that might draw the reader’s attention to the formal aspects of the text. They also avoided colloquialisms, seeing them as a stylistic flaw, imitating instead the pure and moderate speech of educated Russian society. For example, there is a typical Dickensian scene of a comic quarrel between Pickwick and Tupman, where the latter is going to dress for a costume ball as a bandit, something the former finds indecent. Though adding nothing to the plot, this dialogue is a great example of Dickens’s humor and style, as evident from the following excerpt, which displays

Charles Dickens in Russia 113 the author’s comically expressive remarks (underlined), comic repetitions (bold), and distinctive rhythm of alternating long and short phrases: “I shall go as a bandit,” interposed Mr. Tupman. “What!” said Mr. Pickwick, with a sudden start. “As a bandit,” repeated Mr. Tupman, mildly. “You don’t mean to say,” said Mr. Pickwick, gazing with solemn sternness at his friend—“you don’t mean to say, Mr. Tupman, that it is your intention to put yourself into a green velvet jacket, with a twoinch tail?” “Such IS my intention, Sir,” replied Mr. Tupman warmly. “And why not, sir?” “Because, Sir,” said Mr. Pickwick, considerably excited—“because you are too old, Sir.” “Too old!” exclaimed Mr. Tupman. “And if any further ground of objection be wanting,” continued Mr. Pickwick, “you are too fat, sir.” “Sir,” said Mr. Tupman, his face suffused with a crimson glow, “this is an insult.” “Sir,” replied Mr. Pickwick, in the same tone, “it is not half the insult to you, that your appearance in my presence in a green velvet jacket, with a two-inch tail, would be to me.” [. . .] “Sir,” said Mr. Tupman, “you’re a fellow.” “Sir,” said Mr. Pickwick, “you’re another!” (Dickens 1994, 229) In Syn Otechestva this scene is completely omitted, and in Biblioteka dlia chteniia it is briefly paraphrased; only the sequence of actions is kept, while the repetitions, rhythm and author’s remarks are deleted (see the fragments in underlined bold): Naschet nariadu voznik bylo malenkii spor so storony Pikvika, kotoryi utverzhdal, budto by sharovidnaia figura Topmena ne dovol’no udobna dlia uzkikh shtanov i kurtki andaluztsa, no Topmen nastoial na svoem. (Biblioteka dlia chtenia 1840a, 159) [Regarding the costume, a small argument had broken out from Pickwick’s end, as he argued that the spherical figure of Tupman was not quite right for the tight trousers and the coat of an Andalusian, but Tupman insisted on having it his own way.] Aiming their product at the average subscriber with traditional aesthetic sensibilities, for whom lower-class language could be admitted in fine

114  Marina Kostionova literature only in very limited doses, the early Russian translators neutralize Dickens’s colloquialisms and cockney slang. An example of this can be seen in the dialogue between Sam Weller and Pickwick, where Weller reminds Pickwick of how Jingle the rogue had walked all over him: “Oh—you remember me, I suppose?” said Mr. Pickwick. “I should think so,” replied Sam, with a patronizing wink. “Queer start that ‘ere, but he was one too many for you, warn’t he? Up to snuff and a pinch or two over—eh?” (Dickens 1994, 185) Weller’s speech is ungrammatical, contains phonetic characteristics typical for cockney slang and a colloquial idiom (up to snuff), which means ‘shrewd,’ ‘cunning.’ Vladimir Solonitsyn in Biblioteka dlia chteniia misunderstood the idiom and the humorous play surrounding it (Up to snuff) alludes to sniffing snuff, and Weller develops the metaphor: (and a pinch or two over), and changes the whole meaning of the phrase, while purifying it of all the phonetic, grammatical and lexical signs of colloquial style: —Uznal li ty menia, Sam?—sprosil ego mister Pikvik. —Kazhetsia,—otvechal chelovechek s vidom pokrovitel’stva,—vy, pomnitsia, prikhodili v nashu gostinitsu. S vami byl tolstyi starik, kotoryi ochen’ serdilsia, i drugoi, chto vse niukhal tabak (Biblioteka dlia chtenia 1840a, 147). [—Do you remember me, Sam?—asked him Mr Pickwick. I think so,—replied the man in a patronizing manner.—As far as I remember, you’ve once been to our inn. There was a fat old man with you, very angry, and the other one, who sniffed the snuff all the way.] The translator of Syn Otechestva reduces the dialogue even more and entirely neutralizes the style: —Nu, ty, konechno, uznal menia?—sprosil uchenyi muzh. —Razumeetsia, sudar’ (Syn Otechestva 1838, 95). [—Well, you remember me, of course? asked the learned man. —Certainly, Sir.] These early translations secured Dickens’s reputation as a fashionable author who writes for the entertainment of the public. He was popular, but his popularity irritated professional critics, who predicted that his fame would not last long. In 1840, Severnaia pchela announced a new literary magazine with a sarcastic question: Will it at least be discerning in its selection of belles-lettres? Or will it, as others do, make us read the platitudes of Marryat, the chatter

Charles Dickens in Russia 115 of Balzac, the ugly and strange cartoons of Dickens, the vulgarities of Paul de Kock, the literary speculations of Dumas, the bloody scenes of Sue, and the cries of George Sand? (Severnaia pchela 1840, 1031, italics added) The leading literary critic of the time Vissarion Belinskii placed the novels of Dickens among “the ephemeral pieces of popular fiction” and argued, Though Richardsons, Fieldings, Radcliffs, Lewises, Ducrais-Duminils, Lafontaines . . . Paul de Kocks, Marryats, Dickenses, Lesages, Maturins, Hugos, De Vignis have their relative value and do, or did, deserve their fame, they should not be confused with the names of such novelists as Cervantes, Walter Scott, Cooper, Hoffmann and Goethe. (Otechestvennye zapiski 1841, 41; italics added) Equating Dickens to Paul de Kock becomes a cliché: in 1841 Severnaia pchela calls him “Paul de Kock of the Three Kingdoms” (Severnaia pchela 1841, 170), Literaturnaia gazeta [Literary Newspaper]—“the British Paul de Kock” (Literaturnaia gazeta 1841), and he is compared to Paul de Kock in Otechestvennye zapiski [Annals of the Fatherland] as well (Otechestvennye zapiski 1841, 41–42), etc.

Dickens as an Innovative Writer: Vvedenskii’s Translation (1849–1850) The new turn in the literary reputation of Dickens began in the midto-late 1840s, when the so-called natural school assumed the central position in the Russian literary system. What had been perceived as shortcomings in Dickens’s writing are now viewed as merits, in tune with the values of the “natural school”: an interest in the dark or low sides of urban life, democratization of language and extensive use of colloquialisms, interest in typical traits of the national mentality and way of life, social themes, and a passion for the strange and the individual—from grotesque portraits of characters to the use of stylistic devices that make the text unusual and even strange rather than fluent. A key role in creating the new reputation of Dickens was played by Belinskii, who viewed the rise of the natural school, with its interest in the typical, the national and the real as opposed to the ideal, or rhetoric, as evidence of the maturity of Russian literature. While in 1841, Belinskii had thought Dickens to be a second-rate entertaining writer, in 1847, he called him a writer with “a talent of the highest rank” (Sovremennik 1847, 46), and in 1848 a “true poet” and a socially responsible one (Belinskii 1848), a fact that in no way diminishes his aesthetic value. In the 1840s, Dickens was mostly published in the magazine Otechestvennye zapiski, which positioned itself as a supporter of the natural school. In 1849–50 it published in monthly installments the new translation of Pickwick made by Irinarkh Vvedenskii—a philologist and

116  Marina Kostionova professor, a man of humble origin, who shared Belinskii’s views on literature and highly valued the natural school. Vvedenskii saw Dickens not as a British Paul de Kock, but as a British Gogol—a modern, innovative writer, a gifted stylist, and a keen observer of the national mentality and life, who was highly aware of the social problems of his time. Gogol by that time had the reputation of the “father of the natural school” and the greatest of contemporary Russian writers. In this context it turns out that there was much in common between Dickens and Gogol: from the choice of themes—comic sketches of national life—to style (imitation of oral speech with its tautologies and irregularities, grotesque images, colloquialisms, and slang). Vvedenskii in his translation revealed and—in some cases—imposed this similarity. As his translation is not abridged, the reader for the first time had access to the original structure of the novel: a set of travel sketches reminiscent of Gogol’s novel Dead Souls— and to the specificity of Dickens’s imagery and style, which were greatly reduced or eliminated in the early translations for the sake of the plot. Eager to show these new sides of Dickens’s talent, Vvedenskii acted as a coauthor, intensifying Dickens’s expressiveness, recreating and even exaggerating his typical stylistic devices, such as repetitions and rhythm, carefully rendering his colloquialisms and even adding his own, while creatively imitating oral speech. The scene of the argument between Pickwick and Tupman mentioned earlier is in Vvedenskii’s translation rendered in full—he is interested in Dickens’s style and in his characters who express themselves through their speech rather than through the plot, and so decides that this comic dialogue deserves the reader’s full attention (see underlined text—comically expressive author’s remarks—and comic repetitions in bold). —A ia budu banditom,—perebil m-r Topman. —Chem?—voskliknul izumlennyi m-r Pikkvik. —Banditom,—skromno povtoril m-r Topman. —Poslushai, liubeznyi drug,—skazal m-r Pikkvik, brosaia surovyi vzgliad na svoego druga,—ty, esli ne oshibaius’, khochesh nariaditsia v zelenuiu barkhatnuiu kurtku s koroten’kimi faldami v dva diuima? —Tochno tak. Razve eto vas udivliaet?—s zhivost’iu sprosil m-r Topman. —Ochen’. —Otchego zhe? —Ottogo, liubeznyi drug, chto ty slishkom star dlia zelenoi kurtki. —Star! —I uzh esli poshlo delo na pravdu, ty slishkom tolst. —Tolst! —I star, i tolst!—podtverdil m-r Pikkvik energicheskim tonom. —Ser,—voskliknul m-r Topman, vstavaia s mesta s pokrasnevshim litsom, prichem glaza ego zaiskrilis’ plamennym negodovaniem,—vy menia obizhaete, ser. [. . .]

Charles Dickens in Russia 117 —Ser,—skazal m-r Topman,—vy grubiian. —Ser,—skazal m-r Pikkvik,—vy grubiian. (Dikkens 1871, 149) [—And I will go as a bandit,—interrupted Mr. Tupman. —A what?—exclaimed Mr. Pickwick in astonishment. —A bandit,—repeated Mr. Tupman modestly. —Listen, my dear friend,—said Mr. Pickwick, casting a stern glance on his friend,—if I’m not mistaken, you want to put on a green velvet coat with a short two-inch tail? —Exactly. Are you surprised?—asked Mr. Tupman lively. —Very. —But why? —Because, my dear friend, you are too old for a green coat. —Old! —And to speak out all the truth, you are too fat. —Fat! —Both old and fat!—confirmed Mr. Pickwick energetically. —Sir,—exclaimed Mr. Tupman, standing up from his seat with a blushing face, his eyes with ardent indignation,—you are insulting me, Sir. [. . .] —Sir,—said Mr. Tupman,—you are a rude fellow. —Sir,—said Mr. Pickwick,—you are a rude fellow.] Vvedenskii keeps Dickens’s repetitions, though not exactly where they are in the original text. He even emphasizes this feature by adding one more star [old] and two more mentions of tolst [fat], and by duplicating the phrase vy grubiian [you are a rude fellow] where Dickens varies the wording (“you are a fellow—you are another”). He also adds four lines in the dialogue (Ochen’.—Otchego zhe? [Very!—But why?], Tolst!—I star, i tolst! [Fat!—Both old and fat!]) to make its rhythm more evident, more tense and dynamic, and he cuts some of the author’s remarks that risk obscuring the rhythm. Unlike the earlier translators, Vvedenskii lovingly recreates Dickens’s colloquialisms, from swearing to idioms. Introducing this “low,” “plebeian” language into high literature is an important achievement of the natural school, and Vvedenskii chose a translation approach that shows Dickens to be a member of that school. When rendering Sam Weller’s speech mentioned earlier; for example, he uses numerous colloquialisms: —Zdravstvuite . . . Nadeius’, vy ne zabyli menia?—sprosil m-r Pikkvik. —Kak mozhno zabyt’ vas!—otvechal Sam, plutovski prischurivaia levym glazom.—Ia posobil vam izlovit’ etogo kanal’iu . . . rasprebestiia, ser, proval ego voz’mi! V odno ukho vlezet, v drugoe vylezet, kak govarivala moia tetka, kogda sverchok zabilsia v ee ukho. (Dikkens 1871, 221)

118  Marina Kostionova [—Hello . . . I hope you haven’t forgotten me?—asked Mr. Pickwick. —How could I forget you!—replied Sam, narrowing his left eye cunningly.—I had lent you a hand to catch that canaille . . . a cunning sly dog, Sir, gorblimy! He can crawl into one ear and come out the other, as my aunt used to say, when a cricket crawled into her ear.] He even invents his own curse word (rasprebestiia, which is derived from bestia [beast, sly dog] with two superlative prefixes) and makes the phrase two times longer in order to introduce an idiom (“He can crawl into one ear and come out the other,” meaning a cunning person) and put a joke built around it into Weller’s mouth. This translation, along with Vvedenskii’s translations of two other novels by Dickens, fully transformed the reputation of Dickens in Russia. In 1849, the journal Moskvitianin calls Dickens “the most notable of modern English novelists” (Moskvitianin 1849). The reviewer of Sovremennik [The Contemporary] in 1849 writes, “Dickens must be named the first [i. e., the best] European novelist of our time” (Sovremennik 1849, 45). A year later Sovremennik names the novels of Dickens and Thackeray among “the best works not only of English but of the whole European literature of our days” (Sovremennik 1850, 93). In 1853, Sovremennik announced that it “is setting a rule to translate for our subscribers every new book of Dickens and Thackeray” (Sovremennik 1853). Dickens is now praised for those very features he shared with the writers of the natural school—and it is Vvedenskii’s translations that made this similarity recognizable to the Russian reader. The high status of the natural school in the Russian literary system now extends to Dickens. Sovremennik appreciated Dickens’s awareness of the social problems of his time, noting that he has become “near and dear to Russian literature” (Sovremennik 1849, 45). “I think that Dickens is, without doubt, the first [i.e., best] European belletrist of the nineteenth century”—writes the critic of Otechestvennye zapiski. Sharing the values of the natural school, he appreciates Dickens for “all his characters are types,” and “they are very specific types, which could only be born and brought up abroad” (Otechestvennye zapiski 1852, 41–45, italics added). Critics even draw parallels between Pickwick and Gogol’s Dead Souls (“Jingle lies like Nozdrev”) (Ibid.), which reflects the context in which Dickens was judged following Vvedenskii’s translations.

Dickens as a Classic: Translations Made in the 1890s From the 1860s onward, however, interest in Dickens began to decline in Russia. This was caused, at least in part, by the triumph of new Russian novelists like Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky, whose work pushed translated literature to the periphery of the Russian literary system. While

Charles Dickens in Russia 119 in the 1840–1850s Dickens was mostly mentioned in monthly magazines, in sections such as “Literary Criticism” and “New Book Reviews,” beginning in the 1860s his name appears most frequently in literary histories, schoolbooks, biographies, reference books, and encyclopedias. Works on the history of literature published at the end of the nineteenth century (Schmidt 1864; Linnichenko 1861; Chuiko 1866; Zotov 1882) present a very consistent image of Dickens: a great writer who influenced deeply not only British but all of Western literature, who was internalized by Russian culture, profoundly shaping it, and a writer on a par with such classic writers like Shakespeare, Cervantes, Sterne, and Walter Scott. He is a humorist who has a gift for observing the details of everyday life and of finding poetry in them, a writer with a rich imagination, passionate and emotional, and empathetic and sympathetic to peoples’ sufferings. His humor is seen as a way of reflecting on human life rather than a mere means of entertaining the public. Last but not least, he is a typically British writer and his works clearly express the British mentality. Some of these features (a gift of observation, an ability to find poetry in everyday life, national British flavor) are as highly appreciated now as they were in the 1850s, whereas others, like his engagement with social issues, are now viewed as shortcomings rather than merits. The critics and historians of the 1890s focused on the eternal aesthetic qualities of Dickens’s writings, not on their social impact—they value his imagination, his compassion for humanity, his strong moral position. Furthermore, if in 1840–1850s Dickens, seen through the prism of the natural school, was praised mostly for his realistic and recognizable types, by the end of nineteenth century he was much more valued for his fantasy and imagination (see, for example, Linnichenko 1866). Toward the end of the nineteenth century, there also appeared several Russian biographies of Dickens. In all of them, he is characterized as one of the greatest and most popular novelists in the world. In 1891 a book by Aleksei Pleshcheev appeared with the title Zhizn’ Dikkensa [The life of Dickens]. The author says, “There are few foreign writers who have been as popular in Russia—and for such a long time—as Dickens” (Pleshcheev 1891, 1). In 1892, Aleksandra Annenskaia in her biography Charl’z Dikkens. Ego zhizn’ i literaturnaia deiatelnost’ [Charles Dickens, his life and literary work] writes that “Dickens can be called with confidence the most popular novelist not only in England, but in the whole world” (Annenskaia 1892, 6). Thus, by the 1890s, Dickens is recognized as a world classic. This coincided with the expansion of literacy and education in Russia, which led to a broadening of the reading public and to the appearance of publishing houses that saw as their mission the enlightenment and education of this broad readership. In the 1890s these publishing houses issued three new translations of The Pickwick Papers: in 1896–1898 the Panteleev

120  Marina Kostionova brothers printed a translation made by Vasilii Rantsov in the 35-volume Sobranie sochinenii Charl’za Dikkensa [Collected works of Charles Dickens], in 1894, the publishing house of Aleksei Suvorin printed an anonymous new translation in the series of world and Russian literature named “Cheap Library”, and in 1892–1897 the publishing house of Florentii Pavlenkov printed Maria Shishmareva’s translation in a ten-volume Polnoe sobranie sochinenii Charl’za Dikkensa [Complete Collected Works of Dickens] (Dikkens 1894; Dikkens 1896; Dikkens 1892–1897). The very forms in which Dickens was published in these years are associated with the literary canon: works that need to be serialized or collected are valuable works, and such editions make this classic heritage more accessible and digestible for the reader. The approach taken in these translations is based on respect for the source text and on the careful recreation of its form, specifically, the sense of proportion and moderation associated with literary classics. The translators stick to the source text much closer than Vvedenskii did, although their translations are not free from mistakes and liberties; at the same time they soften those distinct features of Dickens’s style that Vvedenskii recreated and even exaggerated—such as repetitions, rhythmic prose, and colloquialisms. For example, when Maria Shishmareva translates the aforementioned scene of the argument between Pickwick and Tupman, she carefully recreates the repetitions exactly where they are in the source text (e.g., repeating the phrases “Are you really trying to say . . .” and “Because”), but where Vvedenskii added repetitions on his own, she sticks to the source. Also, unlike Vvedenskii, she keeps in place all the author’s remarks, which make the dialogue more natural and fluent but deprive it of the rhythmic structure present in the source and that had been further highlighted by Vvedenskii’s additions and deletions. —Neuzheli vy khotite skazat’,—progovoril torzhestvenno mister Pikvik, brosaia strogii vzgliad na svoego priiatelia,—neuzheli vy khotite skazat’, mister Topman, chto namereny napialit’ na sebia kurguzuiu zhaketku iz zelenogo barkhata? —Vy ugadali, ser, imenno eto ia i khotel skazat’,—otvechal obizhenno mister Topman.—Razve vy nakhodite eto strannym? —Nakhozhu, ser,—otvechal s prezhnei surovost’iu mister Pikvik. —Pochemu zhe? —Potomu, ser,—prodolzhal, nachinaia volnovat’sia, mister Pikvik,— potomu, chto vy dlia etogo slishkom stary. —Slishkom star! —Da. I esli vam malo etoi prichiny, to est’ i drugaia: vy i staryi, i tolstyi, ser. —Ser!—progovoril, zadykhaias’ ot gneva, mister Topman, i iarkaia kraska zalila ego shcheki.—Ser, eto oskorblenie! (Dikkens 1892–1897)

Charles Dickens in Russia 121 [—Are you really going to say,—pronounced Mr. Pickwick solemnly, casting a stern glance at his friend,—are you really going to say, Mr. Tupman, that you intend to get into a short-tailed jacket of green velvet? —You are right, Sir, that is exactly what I was going to say,—replied Mr. Tupman, affronted.—Do you find it strange? —Yes, I do,—replied Mr. Pickwick with the same sternness. —But why? —Because, Sir,—continued Mr. Pickwick in excitement,—because you are too old for it. —Too old! —Yes. And if this reason is not enough, there is another one: you are not only old, but fat, Sir. —Sir!—said Mr Tupman, gasping in rage, and the bright color rushed into his face.—Sir, this is an insult!] When it comes to colloquialisms, the translators of the 1890s tend to use much more stylistically neutral words and expressions than Vvedenskii did. Where the latter used curse words or occasionally newly coined words typical for oral speech, the former in most cases used either literary words or moderately colloquial idioms that had already made their way into dictionaries. For example, when translating Sam Weller’s speech mentioned earlier, Rantsov seems to use a dictionary of idioms: Vy lovko pustilis’ togda za nim, da tol’ko on ne iz takovskikh: znaet tozhe, gde raki zimuiut! Poka vyi sobiralis’ zadat’ emu pertsu, on davnym-davno navostril lyzhi. (Dikkens 1896) [You had set off in his pursuit smartly, but he is not of that sort: he knows the ropes! While you were getting ready to give him beans, he showed a clean pair of heels to you!] The anonymous translator avoids recreating the colloquialisms, restricting him or herself to the almost meaningless word togo, which signifies in this context ‘we both perfectly understand what happened, but I don’t want to say it aloud because I want to spare your feelings’: “A prezabavnyi byl to molodets. On vas, kazhetsia, nemnozhko togo . . .” [A funny fellow he was! As far as I remember, he kind of . . .] (Dikkens 1894). Shishmareva is the only one to use colloquialisms, but they are milder than Vvedenskii’s highly expressive ones: Zdorovo vy togda raskipiatilis’, tol’ko gde vam tiagatsia s etim plutom! Produvnaia shel’ma—nechego skazat’. (Dikkens 1892–1897)

122  Marina Kostionova [You got really steamed up that time, but you are not the one to mess with that rogue! A sharp lad, nothing to say!] Thus, the translations of Pickwick made in the 1890s can be described as normalizing. They render Dickens as an example of good writing, free from excesses and affectations of style, a writer whose style is fluent and well-balanced rather than, say, innovative or “plebeian” (if we recall Vvedenskii’s vision of Dickens). These translations along with translations of other novels of Dickens made by the same publishing houses with the same agenda in mind secured the reputation of Dickens as a classic author in Russia. In 1895, Mikhail Lederle published a survey entitled “The Russians on the Best Books for Reading.” Lederle asked about 90 respondents to list “the books which impressed you most” and “the books with which you think it necessary to acquaint the youth and the mass reader” (Lederle 1895, 193). Novels of Dickens were listed among the books that received more than seven votes, along with Shakespeare, Byron, Walter Scott, Goethe, Schiller, James Fenimore Cooper, Hugo, Cervantes, and other classic authors of world literature. But probably the most interesting case is an article on Dickens by Charles Edward Turner, a scholar of British origin who lived and worked in Russia for many years. The article was translated and published in the magazine Obrazovanie [Education]. Apart from biographical data on Dickens and a description of his style, this article contains an interesting note that conveys a certain image of Dickens: His stories never were . . . works of a voluminous author writing for quick commercial success. We must excuse the rare vices of his style and the grotesque he sometimes runs into, because those deviations from the classic moderateness are caused by too passionate a heart. (Turner 1898, italics added) Thus while five decades earlier Dickens had been viewed as an entertainer writing for commercial success, by the end of nineteenth century his reputation as a classic author was perceived as something that had always been there: the very thought that Dickens could write for fame and money sounded like “blasphemy” in the context of his new reputation. This is further evidence of how relative and culturally conditioned an author’s literary reputation is, and of how the translation, together with criticism and publishing strategies, can drastically alter an author’s image. By considering an author’s reputation as unchangeable and unconditioned, as well as by canonizing any one translation as the most faithful, the literary community deprives itself of a wider and more complex picture of the writer’s reception and acculturation.

Charles Dickens in Russia 123

Notes 1 The Pickwick Papers, for example, was translated into Russian seven times, with the first translation appearing in 1838 and making its way into the first Russian edition of Dickens’s collected works in the 1890s. 2 All translations in this chapter are mine, M. K., unless otherwise indicated.

References Annenskaia, A. 1892. Ch. Dikkens, ego zhizn’ i literaturnaia deiatel’nost’ [Charles Dickens, his life and literary work]. Saint Petersburg. Belinskii, Vissarion. 1841. “Razdelenie poezii na rody i vidy” [The division of poetry into kinds and genres]. Otechestvennye zapiski 15 (3), section II: 13–64. Belinskii, Vissarion. 1848. “Vzgliad na russkuiu literaturu v 1847 godu” [A review of Russian literature in 1847]. Sovremennik 7 (1), section III, 1–39; and 8 (3), section III: 1–46. Biblioteka dlia chteniia. 1838. Saint Petersburg. 29: 101. Biblioteka dlia chteniia. 1840a. Saint Petersburg. 40, section II: 59–220. Biblioteka dlia chteniia. 1840b. Saint Petersburg. 41, section II: 1–150. Chuiko, V. 1866. “Angliiskie romanisty (po Tenu)” [The english novelists (by Taine)]. Zhenskii vestnik. No. 2: 1–41. Dickens, Charles. 1994. The Pickwick Papers. London: Penguin Books, Dikkens, Ch. 1894. Zamogil’nye zapiski Pikvikskogo kluba [The posthumous papers of the Pickwick Club]. Saint Petersburg: A. Suvorin. Dikkens, Ch. 1896. Posmertnye zapiski Pikvikskogo kluba [The posthumous papers of the Pickwick Club]. In Sobranie sochinenii Charl’za Dikkensa [Charles Dickens’s collected works], 1896–1899, I, II. Saint Petersburg: Panteleev Brothers. Dikkens, Ch. Posmertnye zapiski Pikvikskogo kluba [The posthumous papers of the Pickwick Club]. In Sochineniia Charl’za Dikkensa: Polnoe sobranie [Works of Charles Dickens: the full collection], VI, 1892–1897. Saint Petersburg: F. Pavlenkov. Dikkens, Charl’z [Dickens, Charles]. 1871. Zamogil’nye zapiski Pikvikskogo kluba [The posthumous papers of the Pickwick Club], Vol. 1. Saint Petersburg: Shulgin. “Dikkens, Karl (Bots)” [Charles Dickens (Boz)]. 1849. Moskvitianin. No. 9, part V: 69–92. Lederle, Mikhail. 1895. Mneniia russkikh liudei o luchshikh knigakh dlia chteniia [The Russians’ opinion on the best books for reading]. Saint Petersburg. Lefevere, André and Bassnett Susan. 1998. Constructing Cultures: Essays on the History of Translations. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Lefevere, André. 2000. “Mother Courage’s Cucumbers: Text, System and Refraction in a Theory of Literature.” In The Translation Studies Reader, edited by Lawrence Venuti, 233–250. New York and London: Routledge. Linnichenko, Andrei. 1861. Kurs istorii poezii [A course of the history of literature]. Kiev. Linnichenko, Andrei. 1866. “Obzor poeticheskoi deiatel’nosti angliiskogo romanista Ch. Dikkensa.” [Outline of poetical activity of the english novelist Ch. Dickens]. Universitetskie izvestiia. Kiev, No. 9: 1–11.

124  Marina Kostionova Literaturnaia gazeta. 1841. Saint Petersburg. (22 February), No. 22. “Literaturnye i zhurnal’nye zametki” [Notes on literature and magazines]. 1852. Otechestvennye zapiski. Saint Petersburg. November. Literaturnye pribavleniia k Russkomy Invalidu. 1838. Saint Petersburg. August 20, No. 34. Otechestvennye zapiski. 1839. Saint Petersburg. 7: 95. Otechestvennye zapiski. 1841. Saint Petersburg. 19 (12), section VI: 41–42. Otechestvennye zapiski. 1852. Saint Petersburg. 81: 41–45. Pleshcheev, A. 1891. Zhizn’ Dikkensa [The life of Dickens]. Saint Petersburg: Severnye vesti. Schmidt, Y. 1864. Obzor angliiskoi literatury XIX stoletiia [A review of 19thcentury english literature]. (Anonymous Russian translation). Saint Petersburg: I. Bochkarev’s Publishing House. Severnaia pchela. 1839. Saint Petersburg. No. 30. Severnaia pchela. 1840. Saint Petersburg. No. 258. Severnaia pchela. 1841. Saint Petersburg. No. 43. Sovremennik. 1847. Saint Petersburg. 2 (3): 41–62. Sovremennik. 1849. Saint Petersburg. 14 (3): 45. Sovremennik. 1850. Saint Petersburg. 24 (11): 93. Sovremennik. 1853. Saint Petersburg. 42 (11): 68. Syn otechestva. 1838. Saint Petersburg. 6: 54–116. Syn otechestva. 1839. Saint Petersburg. 8, section IV: 28–48. Turner, Ch E. 1898. “Dikkens.” Obrazovanie. No. 7–8, the series of articles “Angliiskie pisateli XIX veka” [The english writers of the 19th century]. Zotov, Vladimir. 1882. Istoriia vsemirnoi literatury [The history of world literature]. Vol. 4. Saint Petersburg-Moscow.

8 Translation as Experiment Ivan Aksenov’s Pan Tadeusz (1916) Lars Kleberg

Ivan Aksenov (1884–1935), critic, poet, and translator, was a brilliant representative of the genre-crossing and internationalist spirit of the Russian avant-garde. For different reasons, however, his life and works have until recently remained largely ignored outside a small circle of initiated readers (Farsetti 2015; Kleberg 2015). Aksenov belonged to the so-called right-wing futurists of the Centrifuge, a short-lived group that included the young Boris Pasternak. He was an ardent anti-Symbolist, a polyglot, and a master of all techniques, who insisted on the importance of rhythm and texture rather than ideas and harmonic structures. His early poetry was original and provocative, thematically as well as formally. The same is true for his controversial translation practices. During WW I, Aksenov made a triple début. His first book, influenced by Stéphane Mallarmé and French Cubism, was a collection of poetry, Neuvazhitel’nye osnovaniia [Invalid foundations], which Vladimir Markov called “brilliant and difficult” (Aksenov 1916a; Markov 1968, 271). The book was soon after followed by an anthology of translations of English Renaissance revenge tragedies, entitled Elisavetintsy [The Elizabethans] (Aksenov 1916b). The third publication was a book-length essay on Picasso, the first theoretical analysis of the Cubist artist’s work in any language (Aksenov 1917). One of the surprising features of these three books, each a radical experiment in its field, was that they were all written by a Russian sapper officer in active service on the Eastern front. So, in the middle of World War I, Captain Ivan Aksenov chose, among other things, to involve himself in translating English seventeenth-century plays, some of the most cruel in world drama, full of “lust, incest, fratricide, rape, adultery, mutual suspicion, hate, and bloodshed,” to use the words (perhaps not without appreciation) of the Victorian critic Addington Symonds (1903, xiv). A strange kind of distraction from the cruelties of war, one might say. Aksenov’s collection, which included three plays—John Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, John Webster’s The White Devil, and Cyril Tourneur’s The Atheists Tragedy1—were met by contemporary critics more with incredulity than with enthu​siasm (Aksenov 1916b; Meilakh 2012). The reason for this was not only Aksenov’s unusual choice of texts but even more the translator’s chosen method.

126  Lars Kleberg Aksenov was anti-Symbolist from the start. He made his first appearance in the press in 1912 with an article discarding all earlier interpretations of the fin-de-siècle painter Mikhail Vrubel’, stating that the late artist was not at all notable for the mystical content that the Symbolist critics had projected onto his paintings but only for his never-ending efforts “to characterize with painterly means the spatiality of the depicted bodies” (Aksenov 2008, I, 192). Form and rhythm would remain the key concepts in everything Aksenov wrote the following 23 years, irrespective of the theme: painting or verse, drama or translation, and stage production or cinema. His relation to the earlier literary generation was mixed. He destroyed his first collection of poetry because he found it too dependent on the Symbolists. In a letter to Sergei Bobrov of 18 March 1916, he confessed that he was not up-to-date in contemporary Russian literature because he had escaped from “the intestinal flora of [the Symbolist leader] V. Ivanov et al.” into French pictorial art. His novel, The Pillars of Hercules (ca. 1920) and his studies in metrics were, however, strongly influenced by the Symbolist Andrei Belyi. Already in the collection Invalid Foundations, one of the most hermetic Russian poetry collections ever published, the author showed himself to be a master of verbal art. The book, which mixes more traditional verse forms with Futurist collage-like experiments, is rich in erudite and obscure allusions that are often used with a considerable dose of twisted irony. Epigraphs from writers as disparate as Shakespeare, the fellow Centrifugist Sergei Bobrov, Max Jacob, Guido Cavalcanti, and John Webster are mixed with hidden references to the New and Old Testaments, esoteric philosophy, mathematics, and ancient classics. The texts would actually need the sort of exhaustive annotation that T. S. Eliot provided in The Waste Land. Incidentally, there is a striking overlap between Eliot’s echo chamber of quotations and those of his Russian near-contemporary; Aksenov was four years older than Eliot. If a writer seems to know everything and be able to do anything, he will probably look for restrictions. And what could offer more restrictions than translation? In turning to translation, Aksenov could hardly have found source texts of greater complexity and obscurity than the English revenge tragedies. The restrictions posed by any translation can, of course, differ—from paraphrase to complete submission to the forms of the source text. The translation method Aksenov launched can best be described as an application of the law of most resistance. He set himself the goal of rendering already obscure and elliptic Elizabethan dialogues, in which many expressions are unclear even to scholars of the language, in exact rhythmical equivalents. Thus not only was every Russian line to correspond to every English line, but ideally every English phrase was to have a corresponding Russian phrase, and every English syllable was to have its Russian counterpart—all of this while remaining as close as possible to the original word order and sound orchestration. One can

Translation as Experiment 127 imagine what obstacles this approach must have presented if one considers a single line from Shakespeare, “To be or not to be, that is the question,” for few languages are as rich in monosyllabic words as English. In the “Envoi” concluding the Elizabethan anthology, Aksenov stated that “[i]n the present translation the following are preserved: the number of lines—everywhere; and almost everywhere (within the possibilities of syntactic correspondence of the Russian and English languages)—the movement of the verse” (Aksenov 2008, II, 11) And he ended, with an irony that would become his signature as a writer, paraphrasing the “translator’s apologies” so popular in seventeenth-century English translations: The shortcomings in the translation are more obvious to me than to any of my future critics—I especially cherish these shortcomings. I do not intend to plead in my defense the circumstances under which I was obliged to finish the translation of Webster, translate Tourneur or write the present commentary—these circumstances are most appropriate for communicating with the great poets; nor is it fitting for me to refer to my profession, which at present is the most common among all civilized and some savage peoples. What forces me to love the weakness of my labors is the hope to incur the displeasure of anyone who is more capable, to whose irritation I will be indebted for freeing me from the onerous and responsible obligation to continue the present series. (Aksenov 2008, II, 11)2 Aksenov’s Elizabethan translations were strained, and strange. One of the more understanding critics, Viktor Zhirmunskii (later associated with the Leningrad formalists), wrote: The translator has labored exhaustively on the difficulties of the original. One senses the attention that has been paid to the language, the struggle with words, the aspiration to get as close as possible to the nuances of the rendered verbal form, to its artistic fullness and intensity. The Russian Elizabethans definitely possess a distinctive poetic reality that is sometimes almost equal to that of the English writers. Unfortunately, faulty poetic theories are responsible for significant shortcomings in Mr. Aksenov’s book. The translator strives for simple, elementary words and syntactic simplicity and terseness, eschewing descriptive expressions and complex coordination by means of conjunctions. Aspiring to be faithful to the monosyllabic nature of English, he attempts to squeeze into a line or sentence as many meaningful expressions as possible. This syntactic parsimony often renders his translation incomprehensible. (Zhirmunskii 1917, quoted in Meilakh 2012, 91; translation from Kleberg 2017)

128  Lars Kleberg Other critics faulted the translator for his possibly deficient knowledge of seventeenth-century English. The future professor and Shakespeare specialist Aleksandr Smirnov found Aksenov’s extreme literalism shocking and gave numerous examples of phrases which are impossible to understand, asking, “What is this, simply helplessness or a conscious provocation toward the reader, under the sign of the ‘Centrifuge?’ ” (Smirnov 1917, quoted in Meilakh 2012, 98). The Imagist poet Ivan Gruzinov called Aksenov’s approach to translation a hybrid of the Russian baroque poet Vasilii Trediakovsky and Mallarmé (Gasparov 2000, 121). What none of the critics seems to have appreciated was the dual purpose of Aksenov’s experiment—on the one hand, opposition to the Russian tradition of extensive adaptation of any translation to the presumed tastes of the reader, and on the other, a technical experiment that pushed the principle of literalness as far as possible: in a translation from English, how does the Russian language behave under the restrictions of maximal lexical and rhythmical literalness? What drove Aksenov was an irresistible desire to rebel against existing practices. The result was a kind of Cubist translation with head-on collisions between words and phrases of different nuances or textures that seemed to want to rescue splinters of the original rather than to create a reader-friendly illusion of a whole. It was not a “smooth” translation but one that got stuck crosswise in a peculiar struggle with the Russian language. Aksenov’s Elizabethans were completely—and deliberately—unusable on the stage.3 Less well-known than the Elizabethan translations is Aksenov’s experiment with fragments from the Polish bard Adam Mickiewicz’s verse epic Pan Tadeusz (1834). The translation was undertaken in 1916, parallel to his work on the Elizabethans, which Aksenov confessed was sometimes tiresome. In a letter to his friend Sergei Bobrov, Aksenov wrote on the 28 May 1916, “I try to escape into Mickiewicz” (Aksenov 2008, I, 84). Aksenov’s 1916 manuscript, which is kept in the Russian State Archive for Literature and Art (RGALI) in Moscow, consists of three fragments: the introduction of the poem; the well-known description of the hunting party in Book IV; and part of Book IX, dealing with the quarrel between the Polish gentry and the Russian officer Plutovich. Altogether, the manuscript consists of four typed pages, signed by Aksenov. The introduction has been published in an article by Mikhail Gasparov (Gasparov 1990, 54); the passage from Book IV was, with later corrections, included in a 1943 Soviet edition of the Polish poet’s works (Mitskevich 1943, 97–99); the last fragment has remained unpublished.4 Here I will limit myself to discussing the translation of the introduction to Pan Tadeusz, which is often referred to as “the national epic of Poland,” but is actually a work of multiple genres, with elements of the idyll and the mock-heroic epic (Miłosz 1969, 227–229). The text begins

Translation as Experiment 129 with the well-known invocation, “Litwo! Ojczyzno moja!” [“Lithuania! My Fatherland!”]: Litwo! Ojczyzno moja! ty jesteś jak zdrowie. Ile cię trzeba cenić, ten tylko się dowie, Kto cię stracił. Dziś piękność twą w całej ozdobie Widzę i opisuję, bo tęsknię po tobie. Panno święta, co jasnej bronisz Częstochowy I w Ostrej świecisz Bramie! Ty, co gród zamkowy Nowogródzki ochraniasz z jego wiernym ludem! Jak mnie dziecko do zdrowia powróciłaś cudem (Gdy od płaczącej matki pod Twoją opiekę Ofiarowany, martwą podniosłem powiekę I zaraz mogłem pieszo do Twych świątyń progu Iść za wrócone życie podziękować Bogu), Tak nas powrócisz cudem na Ojczyzny łono. (Mickiewicz 1980, 3–4) The following is an English prose version by George Rapall Noyes from 1917: Lithuania, my country, thou art like health; how much thou shouldst be prized only he can learn who has lost thee. To-day thy beauty in all its splendour I see and describe, for I yearn for thee. Holy Virgin, who protectest bright Czenstochowa and shinest above the Ostra Gate in Wilno! Thou who dost shelter the castle of Nowogrodek with its faithful folk! As by miracle thou didst restore me to health in my childhood—when, offered by my weeping mother to thy protection, I raised my dead eyelids, and could straightway walk to the threshold of thy shrine to thank God for the life returned me—so by miracle thou wilt return us to the bosom of our country. (Mickiewicz 1917, 1) Here is Aksenov’s Russian version: Litva. Otchizna moia. Ty, ved’, kak zdorov’e, Te lish’ dostoinoi tebe platili liubov’iu, Kto utratil tebia. Dnes’ krasu tvoiu opisuiu I proslavl[ia]iu—zane po tebe toskuiu. Presviataia, chto iasnye sterezhesh’ Chenstokhovy I v Ostroi svetish’ Brame. Ty, chto grad Zamkovyi Novogrudskii okhraniaesh’ s ego vernym liudom, Kak rebenku, mne, zdorov’e vorotila chudom,

130  Lars Kleberg Chut’ ot plachushchei materi, pod Tvoiu opeku Zhertvonosimyi, mertvoe podnial ia veko I totchas mog, pesh do sviatyn’ Tvoikh poroga Idti za vozvrashchennuiu zhizn’ blagodarit’ Boga— Tak nas vernesh’, chudom, na otchizny lono! (Mitskevich 1916) [Lithuania. My fatherland. You are just like health, the only ones whohave paid you the love that you deserve Are those who have lost you. Today your beauty I describe and praise—for I yearn for you. Most Holy [Virgin], who protects bright Częstochowa[s] and shines in the Ostra Gate. You, who guards the Castle City of Nowogródek with its faithful people, As you in my childhood by miracle gave me back my health almost straight from my weeping mother, to Your protection, brought as a sacrifice, I raised my dead eyelid, and could straightway walk to the threshold of thy shrine To thank God for the life returned me— So You will, by miracle, return us to the bosom of our fatherland.] The poem’s invocation to the Holy Virgin is followed by a long Homeric simile (in Rapall Noyes’s translation): “As by miracle thou didst restore me to health in my childhood [—] so by miracle thou wilt return us to the bosom of our country.” What does Aksenov do in the introduction we see here? Lexically he follows the original’s tendency to archaic elevated style but takes this even further. There are words with a Church Slavonic ring, such as dnes’ [today] and zane [because]. Presviataia [most holy] transfers the reader to a Russian Church Slavonic and Orthodox context, from the Polish Catholic Panno święta—‘Holy Virgin.’ The use of iasnye (plural, whereas singular in the original) is hardly an adequate translation of jasny, which in Polish—as well as clarus in Latin and its correspondents in other languages of Catholic tradition—means ‘holy.’ In Russian, however, iasnyi does not have this connotation. Zhertvonosimyi—‘brought as a sacrifice’ is an archaizing neologism created by Aksenov. In Russian, the singular veko [eyelid] is used only in Church Slavonic liturgic or in medical contexts, the normal form being the plural veki, whereas the singular powieka is common in Polish. The Russian pesh is a Church Slavonic variant of peshkom, whereas the Polish pieszo is the most commonly used word for ‘walking’ or ‘afoot.’ What conclusions can be drawn from such stylistic observations? Mikhail Gasparov, the only critic who has written about Aksenov’s Mickiewicz fragments, characterizes the translator’s method as literalism: “in the most literal sense of the word—Polish words are reproduced in Polish word order, only in Russian grammatical and syntactic forms.” He then

Translation as Experiment 131 adds: “In Polish this sounds beautiful, in Russian—terrible” (Gasparov 1990, 54). The shock effect is no doubt intended. Gasparov calls it a “deliberate futurist mockery of the reader” (Gasparov 1990, 55). Comparing the Russian version and the original, one can note that Mickiewicz’s typical 13-syllable lines, parted into 7 + 6—the Polish socalled trzynastozgłoskowiec—are translated by Aksenov into Russian syllabic verse, but neither with a strict observation of the number of syllables nor of the obligatory caesura. In Russia, syllabic verse was introduced in the seventeenth century but was replaced in the next century by syllabotonic versification which, brought to perfection by Pushkin, dominated Russian poetry ever since. Aksenov’s versification does not satisfy Gasparov any more than his stylistic peculiarities. Instead of producing a regular 13-syllable verse, Gasparov says, Aksenov “in an appalling manner violates the meter of the original” (Gasparov 1990, 57). In Aksenov’s syllabic rendition of the introductory fragment, Mickiewicz’s 13 syllables are replaced by a variation from 12 to 15 syllables per verse (6 out of 13 are 13 syllabic) and only observes the obligatory caesura in four (if we consider the manuscript’s proslavliu as a misprint for proslavliaiu) out of 13 verses. Thus, sometimes quite close to the Polish original’s lexicon, the translator does not strictly follow its metrical pattern. However, the syllabic principle as such is observed. What, then, was the purpose of Aksenov’s strange stylistic and rhythmical irregularities, which deviate both from Russian usage and from Polish 13-foot syllabic verse? Here, we need to look at the literary context. The established Russian translation of Pan Tadeusz in Aksenov’s time was a version by Nikolai Berg, published first in 1875 and reprinted in 1907. Berg (1823–1884) was a prolific translator of Polish poetry. Iurii Levin calls him “the most significant translator of Slavic folklore and Slavic poets” of his time (Levin 1985, 289), an evaluation that holds true mainly from a quantitative point of view. Berg is said to have translated poetry from no less than 28 languages, mostly from Serbian, Czech, and Polish. He made his first translations and “imitations” of Mickiewicz already in the 1840s and considered his versions of the Polish bard’s works his main achievement (Mezentseva 2002). However, some of Berg’s contemporaries were already critical of his method of translation. The poet and editor Nikolai Nekrasov, who considered Berg a not untalented poet, questioned some of his ’liberties,’ the most striking example being the early version of Mickiewicz’s sonnet “To the Neman,” published without title and with the opening words “Neman, river of my homeland” substituted by “O Mother Volga, river of my homeland.” (A later version restored the toponym. See Mitskevich 1976, 326). In 1920 or 1921 the poet Vladislav Khodasevich (1886–1939), who was of Polish origin, was preparing a collection of Russian translations of Mickiewicz for the publishing house Tvorchestvo [Creation] (the project was never realized). Discussing the achievements of earlier translators,

132  Lars Kleberg Khodasevich made the following comments on Berg and his translation of Mickiewicz’s Crimean sonnet “The Pilgrim”: Besides the deviations from the form of the original, the translation is endlessly far from the original. There is very much which is lacking, and even more ad-libbing. Instead of Lithuania, for which M-cz is longing, Berg has: “But I dream of the snow storms of my homeland . . . O, Russia! Your sleeping woods . . .”. M-cz says: “Lithuania! the sighing woods were singing more beautifully . . .”. There is, of course, not a word about snow storms in the original. However pleasant the translation may sound, it is completely unsatisfactory as a translation of Mickiewicz. (Quoted in Belza 1970, 69)5 Berg’s Pan Tadeusz was typical in his paraphrasing style, resulting in a pleasant but monotonous stream of six-foot iambic couplets with alternating feminine and masculine rhymes, completely lacking the vivacity, color, and humor of Mickiewicz’s pseudo-idyllic epic. In order to make his paraphrase smooth and readable, Berg made numerous additions as well simplifications and elisions, the most notable no doubt being the censoring of the very key word of the incantation—Litwo!—Lithuania! Berg simply begins in the following way: Otchizna milaia! Podobno ty zdorov’iu: Tot istinoi k tebe ispolnitsia liubov’iu, Kto poterial tebia . . . V stradaniiakh i v bor’be, Otchizna milaia, ia plachu po tebe! Mat’ Bogoroditsa, chto bodrstvuesh’ nad Vilnoi, Svoei opekoiu, shchedrotami obil’noi! Mat’ Chenstokhovskaia, na Iasnoi chto Gore: Kak umiraiushchii lezhal ia na odre, Ustami zharkimi khvalu tebe chitaia, I ty spasla menia, zastupnitsa sviataia: Tak blagostyneiu bozhestvennykh shchedrot Spasesh’ kogda-nibud’ narod. [Dear fatherland! You are like health: The one who is truly filled with love for you, Is the one who has lost you . . . In suffering and in battle, Dear fatherland, I cry over you! Mother of God, who covers Vilnius With her shroud, filled with beneficence! Mother of Czestochowa, on your Bright Mountain: Like someone dead I lay in a stupor, With warm lips reciting your praises,

Translation as Experiment 133 And you saved me, holy protectress, As with the goodness of your divine beneficence You will one day save the people.] (Mitskevich 1907, 5) Through his elisions, Berg shortens the number of verses of the original from 13 to 12, even when inserting “Dear fatherland” a second time in line 4. Obviously, there was much in Berg’s established translation of Pan Tadeusz for a literalist to deviate from, and to turn upside down. But one must ask: Why did Aksenov have any interest in this “national epic,” especially in 1916, when he was occupied with the English Elizabethans? Otherwise, the Futurist never showed any interest whatsoever either in Polish literature or in Romanticism in general. Here the biographical or perhaps bio-topographical context becomes significant. Aksenov signed his afterword to Elizabethans as follows: “March—April 1916, Shchara River.” At the time, Aksenov and his sapper regiment of the Russian Imperial Army was deployed at the Shchara River, which is a tributary to the Neman River in what is today Belarus. One of the nearest towns in the region is Nowogródek (or in Belorussian, Navagrudak)—that is, the birthplace of Adam Mickiewicz, mentioned in the introduction to the poem. So, situated some 30–40 miles from Nowogródek, Aksenov in spring 1916 actually found himself in the middle of the landscape where Pan Tadeusz takes place. On the banks of Shchara River, Mickiewicz was, so to say, near at hand. Here Aksenov began to translate, “escaping into Mickiewicz.” To return to Aksenov’s “literalist” fragments of Pan Tadeusz, it is obvious that the translation neither sticks very closely to Mickiewicz’s characteristic 13-syllabic pattern, nor to his vocabulary. The translation is strange, but its strangeness is not Polish Romantic, but rather more archaic. What did these irregularities mean? A hypothetical answer would be that the poet-translator was, again, interested in an experiment. The experiment could this time be formulated as follows: How does the Russian language—the language of the Empire he served as an officer—behave under the restrictions of a foreign language, the language of the oppressed people, as Poles were at the time? Aksenov’s Russian certainly behaves strangely here, as Gasparov points out. But not only strangely. There are also, no doubt, moments of high poetic tension. Perhaps one could call Aksenov’s Pan Tadeusz a mixture of Mickiewicz and the seventeenthcentury Elizabethans. The syllabic verse of Aksenov indeed takes us further back, beyond Polish Romanticism, to the seventeenth century. Or, to put it differently, not to the times of Mickiewicz but to the times when Russian literature was learning to speak with the help of Polish models—through the works of the churchman and poet Simeon Polotskii (who brought Western literary forms to Moscow from Poland and Kiev) and others. That is, to the times when Poland was not partitioned

134  Lars Kleberg and oppressed, but the powerful Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, cultural center of Central Europe, one of the capitals of which was Nowogródek, later Adam Mickiewicz’s birthplace, not far from the Shchara River, where Ivan Aksenov, in 1916, was carrying out his experimental translation.

Notes 1 In Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, the decadent Lord Henry says: “But you must think of that lonely death in the tawdry dressing-room simply as a strange lurid fragment from some Jacobean [sic] tragedy, as a wonderful scene from Webster, or Ford, or Cyril Tourneur” (Wilde 1985, 115). 2 The translation of Aksenov’s text here and next is made by Charles Rougle and included in Kleberg 2017 (forthcoming). 3 A critical analysis of Aksenov’s Elizabethans is found in Meilakh 2012, 83–103. 4 Special thanks to Elena Zemskova, who has provided me with a copy of Aksenov’s manuscript kept in RGALI, the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art. 5 Cf. the Polish translator and critic Seweryn Pollak’s similar evaluation of Berg’s work (Pollak 1962, 279–281).

References Addington Symonds, John. 1903. “Introduction.” In The Best Plays of Webster and Tourneur, with an Introduction and Notes by John Addington Symonds, vi—xiii. London: Fisher Unwin Ltd. Aksenov, Ivan. 1916a. Neuvazhitel’nye osnovaniia [Invalid Foundations]. Moscow: [Tsentrifuga]. Reprinted in Aksenov, Ivan. 2008. Iz tvorcheskogo naslediia v dvukh tomakh [Selected Works in Two Volumes], II, edited by Natal’ia Adaskina, 98–116. Moscow: RA. Aksenov, Ivan. 1916b. Elisavetintsy: Vypusk I [Elizabethans: Volume I]. Moscow: Knigoizdatel’stvo Tsentrifuga. Aksenov, Ivan. 1917. Pikasso i okrestnosti [Picasso and the Environs]. Moscow: Tsentrifuga. Reprinted in Aksenov, Ivan. 2008. Iz tvorcheskogo naslediia v dvukh tomakh [Selected Works in Two Volumes], I, edited by Natal’ia Adaskina, 198–249. Moscow: RA. Aksenov, Ivan. 2008. Iz tvorcheskogo naslediia v dvukh tomakh [Selected Works in Two Volumes], I—II. Edited by Natal’ia Adaskina. Moscow: RA. Belza, S. I. 1970. “K istorii russkikh perevodov Mitskevicha” [On the History of Russian Translations of Mickiewicz]. Sovetskoe slavianovedenie 1970: 6, 67–73. Farsetti, Alessandro. 2015. La poesia di Ivan Aksenov (1914–1921) nel contesto dell’avanguardia russa: un’interpretazione. Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation, Università Ca’ Foscari, Venezia. Gasparov, Mikhail. 1990. “Bukvalizm slovesnyi protiv bukvalizma ritmicheskogo (Neizdannyi perevod iz ‘Pana Tadeusha’)” [Verbal Literalism vs. Rhythmical Literalism (An Unpublished Translation from ‘Pan Tadeusz’)]. In Quinquagenario Alexandri Il’ušini oblata, edited by M. I. Shapir, 53–62. Moscow: Moskovskii gosudarstevennyi universitet, Filologicheskii fakultet. Gasparov, Mikhail. 2000. Zapisi i vypiski [Notes and Excerpts]. Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie.

Translation as Experiment 135 Kleberg, Lars. 2015. Vid avantgardets korsvägar: Om Ivan Aksionov och den ryska modernismen [At the Crossroads of the Avantgarde: On Ivan Aksenov and Russian Modernism]. Stockholm: Natur & Kultur. Kleberg, Lars. 2017. At the Crossroads of the Avantgarde: Ivan Aksyonov and Russian Modernism. Translated by Charles Rougle. Forthcoming. Kleberg, Lars and Aleksei Semenenko (eds.). 2012. Aksenov and the Environs: Aksenov i okrestnosti. Huddinge: Södertörns högskola. Landa, Semen. 1976. “ ‘Sonety’ Adama Mitskevicha” [“The Sonnets” of Adam Mickiewicz]. In Mickiewicz, Adam. Sonety [Sonnets], Literaturnye pamiatniki [Literary Monuments], edited by Semen Landa, 225–338. Leningrad: Nauka. Levin, Iurii. 1985. Russkie perevodchiki XIX veka i razvitie chudozhestvennogo perevoda [Russian 19th Century Translators and the Development of Literary Translation]. Nauka: Leningrad. Markov, Vladimir. 1968. Russian Futurism: A History. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Meilakh, Mikhail. 2012. “Aksenov—perevodchik elizavetintsev” [Aksenov: Translator of the Elizabethans]. In Aksenov and the Environs: Aksenov i okrestnosti, edited by Lars Kleberg and Aleksei Semenenko, 83–103. Huddinge: Södertörns högskola. Mezentseva, Iuliia. 2002. “K istorii russkikh perevodov poemy A. Mitskevicha ‘Pan Tadeush’ ” [Toward a History of Russian Translations of A. Mickiewicz’s Poem “Pan Tadeusz”]. In Romantizm: grani i sud’by. Vyp. 4 [Romanticism: Limits and Fates], edited by I. V. Kartashova, 122–127. Tver’: TvGU. Mickiewicz, Adam. 1917. Pan Tadeusz, or the Last Foray in Lithuania: A Story of the Life Among Polish Gentlefolk in the Years 1811 and 1812. Translated from the Polish by George Rapall Noyes [Prose Translation]. London and Tortonto: J.M. Dent & Sons Ltd. Facsimile available online: https://archive.org/ details/pantadeuszorlast00mick (Accessed 1 January 2017). Mickiewicz, Adam. 1980 [1834]. Pan Tadeusz czyli ostatni zajazd na Litwie: Historia szlachecka z roku 1811 i 1812 we dwunastu księgach. Wyd. 8. Opracował Stanisław Pigoń. Wrocław, Warszawa, Kraków, Gdańsk: Zakład Narodowy im. Ossolińskich. Wydawnictwo. Miłosz, Czesław. 1969. The History of Polish Literature. New York: Macmillan Publishing. Mitskevich, Adam [Mickiewicz, Adam]. 1907. Pan Tadeush: poema [Pan Tadeusz: A Poem]. Translated from Polish by Nikolai Berg. Saint Petersburg: L.F. Panteleev. Mitskevich, Adam [Mickiewicz, Adam]. 1916. “Pan Tadeush ili poslednii naezd na Litve: Shlakhetskaia istoriia 1811–1812 godov v dvenadtsati knigakh stikhami” [Pan Tadeusz, or the Last Foray in Lithuania: A Tale of the Gentry in the Years 1811 and 1812 in Twelve Books in Verse]. (Pesn’ I, pesn’ VI [=IV], pesn’ VII [=IX]) [Song I, song VI (=IV), song VII (=IX)]), translation by I. A. Aksenov, ms. RGALI. F. 1640. Op. 1. D. 2. Mitskevich, Adam [Mickiewicz, Adam]. 1943. “Iz poemy ‘Pan Tadeush’: Iz IV knigi” [From the Poem “Pan Taduesz”: From book IV]. Translated by I. Aksenov. In Izbrannoe [Selected Works], editor unknown, 97–99. Moscow: Goslitizdat. Mitskevich, Adam [Mickiewicz, Adam]. 1976. Sonety [Sonnets], edited by Semen S. Landa. Leningrad: Nauka.

136  Lars Kleberg Pollak, Seweryn. 1962. “Mickiewicz w przekładach rosyjskich” [Mickiewicz in Russian Translations]. In his Wyprawy za trzy morza. Szkice o literaturze rosyjskiej [Journey Beyond Three Seas: Essays on Russian Literature], 268– 298. Warsaw: Czytelnik. Smirnov, Aleksandr. 1917. “Elisavetintsy . . . Vyp. 1. (retsenziia)” [The Elizabethans . . . Vol. 1 (Review)]. Russkaia mysl’ (Kriticheskoe obozrenie) 1 (January): 2–3. Wilde, Oscar. 1985 [1891]. The Picture of Dorian Gray. Edited by Peter Ackroyd. London: Penguin Books. Zhirmunskii, Viktor 1917. “I.A. Aksenov: Elizavetintsy. Vypusk pervyi” [I.A. Aksenov: The Elizabethans: Volume one]. Severnye zapiski (January): 270–272.

Part II

Soviet Contexts

9 Translation and Transnationalism Non-European Writers and Soviet Power in the1920s and 1930s Katerina Clark

Michael Cronin suggests in Translation and Globalization that rather than talking about globalization and translation, we should consider globalization as translation. Translation, he argues, is not a by-product of globalization; it is a constituent, integral part of the phenomenon (Cronin 2003, 34). Translation is a by-product of globalization in that readers all over the world are sampling common texts that have in many instances been brought to them by translation, or they are reading them in one of the most widespread languages of the world, such as English or Spanish but, inasmuch as this is not their native language, are translating for themselves in the very act of reading. But at the same time translation in the broader sense is “a constituent, integral part” of globalization to the extent that globalization purports to diminish the local and vernacular. Though globalization is considered a relatively recent phenomenon, one sees an analogous process of “translation” in the attempts of the Soviet Union to create a transnational cultural space (here I will confine myself to looking at this in the 1920s and 1930s). The Soviet Union sought to “globalize” its political-cum-ideological system, or minimally its culture. It sought to disseminate a transnational “language,” not a language in the traditional sense but more a shared discourse that used ideologically inflected common tropes and plot functions. Translation was crucial for realizing this aim. Translation was also important for another project, but in this case, it entailed not dissemination of texts and discourse abroad, but assimilation of foreign literature at home. The two could be seen as linked in the general project of realizing a world literature. In the 1920s, and especially in the 1930s the Soviet Union was committed to a version of “world literature,” not of the highbrow, a-political and Paris-oriented world literature that Pascale Casanova discusses in her book The World Republic of Letters (Casanova 2007) but rather a world literature that sees as its justification those lines in “The Communist Manifesto” (1848): In the place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have all-round intercourse [Verkehr], universal independence of

140  Katerina Clark nations. And as in material, so also in spiritual [geistigen] production. The spiritual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness [Beschränktheit] become more and more impossible, and from numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature. (Marx and Engels 1848) Translation was inevitably a constituent part of Marx’s world literature based in Marxist discourse. The explicit Soviet aim of fostering a “world literature,” then, had both an internal and an external component. On the one hand, under the slogan “world literature” the Soviet Union set about appropriating (translating and publishing) major literary texts from all over the world. This enterprise was in part to build up its own image, a route to national aggrandizement that would take the nation to the cultural level necessary for it to become a world leader (Berman 1992, 11). In the process, foreign texts were reworked, re-inflected for the specifica of Marxism-Leninism and the Stalinist epoch.2 Translation became an important aspect of Soviet cultural life and a source of income for numberless writers and other intellectuals. Translation was also endemic to the Soviet project. Several theorists have proposed recently that we should consider the colony as translation. Of course, it is not a translation in the literal sense but in the extended sense that has become popular since translation theory’s so-called cultural turn. The colonizing power is the source, the original from which the colony derives its characteristics, so that that colony is de facto a version of the original, a copy, a translation (Bassnett 2014, 50). Alexander Etkind and others have written lately of the Soviet Union as an example of internal colonization (Etkind 2011). But the Soviet Union was not a translation of an already-existing reality into one hitherto quite unlike it, as in the case of the colony, but rather an attempted translation of a text-based “reality,” or projected reality, into an already-existing culture system. In the Soviet case, the “colonization” was not only internal, but also potentially transnational. This is one reason why literary texts, translations of ideology and policies into representations of the lives of “real” humans, were important as potential media for achieving the overall translation. Translation, then, was partly done for high-minded reasons, but it was also critical for soft power. As Edwin Gentzler and Maria Tymoczko have put it in their introduction to Translation and Power, [c]olonialism and imperialism were and are made possible not just by military might or economic advantage but by knowledge as well; knowledge and the representations thus configured are coming to be understood as a central aspect of power. Translation has been a key tool in the production of such knowledge and representations. (Gentzler and Tymoczko 2002, xxi)

Translation and Transnationalism 141 In any expansive “colonization” such as the one Soviet Union attempted, the would-be colonizers or proselytizers come up against the problem of language. World literature was intended to supersede the vernacular as Sanskrit and other “global” literatures had done in the past, to generate a common discourse and concomitant literary practices (Pollock 2006, 9, 14). The Soviet Union had no acceptable lingua franca of the order of Sanskrit or ancient Persian or Latin, whose wide territorial and cultural reach had developed over a long period and through conquest. So in seeking to implement their internationalist designs translation was crucial. Most educated Europeans of the first half of the twentieth century knew French, English, and German, but not Russian. However, given the Soviet appetite for the global a very large number of languages needed to be covered, not just the core European ones, and for many of them there were few or no specialists. To give one example, in the 1920s, several translations of works by Rabindranath Tagore appeared but they were, ironically given the Soviet anti-imperialist stance, almost all translations of published English translations of his works. The few made from the Bengali originals were done by Mikhail Tubianskii, a member of the Bakhtin circle and specialist in Sanskrit and Bengali. From the very beginning, translation of foreign literature played a major role in Soviet intellectual life. In 1918 on Gorky’s initiative the publishing house Vsemirnaia literatura [World literature] was established, supplemented by other outlets for translated material such as, in the case of Asian literature, the journal Vostok [The East, The Orient]. The literature published by Vsemirnaia literatura tended to be canonical; in fact, an associated enterprise, Vostok, that published literary works from all over Asia, essentially took texts only from a given language’s classical tradition. A high percentage of all the literary works published in the initial post-revolutionary years represents translations or adaptations from foreign texts. The sheer volume and popularity of Western texts so dwarfed local production that, the Formalist Boris Eikhenbaum joked, in order to be published in the Soviet Union you now had to call your work a translation and to sign it with a foreign name, adding that in this respect he had an advantage (Eikhenbaum 1924, 3). The early translations were, however, largely from high literature or in the case of contemporary literature not particularly Marxist or politically engagé. Vsemirnaia literatura closed in 1924, but a few years later a new journal somewhat made up the gap, Vestnik inostrannoi literatury [Herald of foreign literature], which began appearing in 1928 and was edited by the great Kulturträger Anatolii Lunacharskii. With the shift from Vsemirnaia literatura to the Vestnik Soviet readers were given more contemporary literature in translation, but also more heavily ideologized framing of the texts in introductions and critical articles. During the course of the 1920s, in another shift, translated literature became less the province of Soviet intellectuals and more an enterprise promoted by the Comintern

142  Katerina Clark and other Soviet bodies that dealt with the international sphere. One of these was the International Organization of Revolutionary Writers, MORP, which was founded in 1930 at a major international meeting of writers held in Kharkov. The Vestnik was superseded by a new literary journal, Literatura mirovoi revoliutsii [Literature of the world revolution] which published foreign works in translation, and began appearing in 1930 under MORP sponsorship. Renamed Internatsional’naia literatura [International literature] in 1933, the journal ran until the Comintern was disbanded in 1943. In 1932 the writer Sergei Tretiakov assumed editorship of this journal and it became the vortex of the great boom in translations of the 1930s. Under Tretiakov (who remained editor until 1937 when he was repressed) Internatsional’naia literatura offered a relatively Catholic selection of foreign literature, extending even to James Joyce’s Ulysses, the early sections of which appeared in the journal in 1935–36 (Tall 2004; Safiullina and Platonov 2012, 239–269). Of course it was not only in this journal that foreign literature was published in translation. There were, just to take English literature, 158 titles published as books, not to mention the titles published in mainstream Soviet periodicals. The 1930s saw a boom in literary translation. As such, it is comparable to what Kemal Atatürk effected in Turkey the same decade when he commissioned the publication of hundreds of Western titles in translation as a means of establishing a secular identity of Turkey and generating a more educated population, but also of securing for her a more respected place in the concert of nations, and of Europe in particular (see Tahir Gürçağlar 2008). But the Soviet translation boom of the 1930s was also an effect of the Soviet Union’s drawing closer to other countries such as France in a Popular Front alliance, and of the prominent role the country played in the anti-fascist effort, and more specifically of Soviet support for the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War. Internatsional’naia literatura was not an isolated journal, but part of a group of semi-parallel Soviet journals that were published in English, French, and German; an edition in Chinese was attempted, but only two issues actually appeared, and later a Spanish edition was established. This stable of journals, then, had a dual purpose: to provide (in Internatsional’naia literatura) foreign literature in translation for Soviet readers; and to foster, through the versions in other languages (together with those in Internatsional’naia literatura) a “commons,” a common store of texts that would conduce to the establishment of a “world literature” based on texts selected in Moscow. Though, however, these journals all came out of the same press in Moscow and ran in tandem, they did not publish identical lists for each issue. After 1933 the German version, Internatsionale Literatur, for instance, was intended to be, and for a large extent became, a forum to help unify the widely dispersed germanophone diaspora of intellectual exiles from Nazi lands. These journals were also

Translation and Transnationalism 143 affiliated with organizations and journals in other countries, such as the John Reed societies in the United States and the journal New Masses, such British periodicals as New Left Review and New Writing, also the publishing house Lawrence and Wishart, which published Soviet literature in translation, and whose editors corresponded with the editors of the Soviet periodicals, negotiating about publication in both directions. These new Comintern-sponsored journals and their affiliated networks overcame the problem of translation, which plagued Soviet attempts at creating a literary commons. The selection and translations were done in the Soviet Union, but the flow of texts was bi-directional. Other organizations were also involved in the bi-lateral exchange of texts, in particular VOKS (the All-Union Society for Cultural Links with Abroad), which distributed Soviet materials throughout the world, arranged cultural exchanges, and helped found friendship societies in a range of countries. VOKS’s functionaries were constantly trying to enlarge the sphere of Soviet influence by distributing Soviet texts, and by no means only ideological ones. Many of the ones they sent were fairly scholarly or informative, and at the center of their operations were literary texts. They also arranged visits to foreign countries of Soviet writers, always scrambling to get a translation of the relevant writer’s works done and published before he arrived.3 A frustrating aspect of their work was the problem of getting texts into a language that the target audience understood. Again and again those organizations or individuals to which texts were sent responded that no one there could read Russian. Please send a version in our language, they would say, or failing that at least English or French.4 The activities of VOKS and the circulation throughout the world of journals from the Internatsional’naia literatura stable could be seen as instruments of would-be Soviet cultural imperialism. They potentially offered dizzying potential for Soviet cultural hegemony in the world. But as can be seen in the way Soviet publications of the 1930s featured French and Spanish authors, as well as exiled germanophones, there was an element of identification and sympathy in these publication projects. As this aspect of sympathy suggests, the translation project was not only about Soviet aggrandizement or hegemonic aims but also about creating a common cultural universe of the like-minded, creating a common tradition that superseded the local. In reality, of course, though there was certainly a lot of lateral discourse, Moscow functioned for most members as the metropole. But rather than dismiss such institutions as agents of an insidious Soviet imperialism, I would suggest that the reality was more complex. Though there were distinctly neo-imperial elements to the fostering of a common discourse, and ideally a hegemonic discourse in works written by authors from a variety of countries, one must not forget that the actors in this process— both the editors (as we saw in the case of Tretiakov and Joyce) and the writers, had their own agendas and practices, and were responding to a

144  Katerina Clark variety of trends within literature. In fact in the Soviet Union what was translated was often the product of a negotiation between intellectuals and Soviet power with bargaining back and forth: publish a work by a writer from the third world and we’ll let you do the Hemingway novel you have been lobbying for (see Sherry 2013). One could review the history of Soviet international publications and networks in terms of the interests and lobbies of intellectuals, rather than of Soviet officials, though as we know these were not entirely distinct categories. Moreover, the Soviet proclivity for publishing foreign literature in translation was not a new trend. During the Silver Age, there was another boom in translations. In fact, in those years, there was scarcely a poet, major or minor who did not produce at least one translation, or stylization, of what was categorized as “Eastern” poetry by which was generally meant the classical Arabic or Persianate, or from the Caucasus. This pre-revolutionary interest in translation got a fillip from the publishing venture Vsemirnaia literatura, to which many prominent intellectuals contributed. The 1927 bibliography of the 200 works it published reads, in terms of the listed translator, editor, or introducer of each work, as a virtual Who’s Who of the literary intelligentsia, and includes names like Nikolai Gumilev—who somehow managed to shepherd almost a dozen titles before being executed in 1921—Aleksandr Blok, Mikhail Kuzmin and Vladimir Sologub (Vsemirnaia literatura 1927). Of course, these writers were attracted to work for the enterprise because they needed to support themselves in dire times. But arguably they also believed in it, whether as Kulturträgers or as lovers of high literature. A further source of “complexity” is the fact that in drawing on Soviet discourse and literary models in their own writing foreign intellectuals did not always feel constrained to make an “exact” translation. Antoinette Burton and Isabel Hofmeier have commented in their introduction to the recently edited collection Ten Books that Shaped the British Empire: Creating an Imperial Commons that the “imperial commons,” by which they mean a group of texts that have had an impact on readers in the far-flung empire, was far from uniformly supportive of the empire or uniformly appreciated, but “both integrated intellectually and perpetually disintegrated by the myriad subjects and agents who constructed, lived inside, and sought to exceed its territorial and epistemological frames” (Burton and Hofmeyr 2014, 23). One can see this process of integration and at the same time dis-integration (resistance, non-canonical formulations) even in the case of the parallel literary journals of Internatsional’naia literatura. Although they were all somewhat orchestrated to be in tandem and there was an umbrella editorial board, at the same time each of the journals had its own editorial board and a slightly different assortment of texts appeared in each. The heterogeneity becomes even more apparent if one looks at how individual foreign writers responded to proffered Soviet models for their work.

Translation and Transnationalism 145 I will discuss this dynamic in three individual case studies, butrather than deal with translation in the context of European and American literature, which statistically made up the overwhelmingly largest share of translations in the 1920s and 1930s, and in the Internatsional’naia literatura journals, I will be focusing here on the translation of non-European writers. Texts from what we would call the third world were numerically a minor presence in the Soviet translation boom by contrast with texts from the trans-Atlantic sphere, but they have their interest because the translation into some non-European culture system was potentially more radical than into a culture from the trans-Atlantic world. For my prime examples of translations to and from texts by nonEuropean writers I am taking three authors: the Chinese Emi Siao,5 the Indian Mulk Raj Anand, and the African American Richard Wright. All three were committed to combating colonialism and imperialism, all three were translated and published in the Soviet Union, particularly in Internatsional’naia literatura, and all three sought in their writings of the 1930s to “translate” Soviet literary paradigms (discourse, plot functions) into their own literary traditions. Of the three, Siao represents an extreme end of the spectrum of fealty to “Moscow” models and was the most committed to Soviet cultural hegemony (a position never assumed by Anand or Wright). In his many official speeches to international writers’ gatherings he consistently called for Chinese writers to follow Soviet literary models and directives from Moscow, and his own literary efforts were crudely propagandistic, but the other two writers I am discussing were less rigidly wedded to authoritative models.6 Particularly telling for the position of Siao are some statements he made in his contribution to the discussion “On Formalism in Art” at the Writers Union in March 1936, in other words, at a meeting called to elicit declarations of fealty and mutual recriminations held in response to the attacks in Pravda that February on Shostakovich, Meyerhold and other “formalists.” This was a somewhat inauspicious occasion, to say the least, but I am not discussing Siao’s remarks here in the context of Soviet repression. In his speech, Siao emphasized, “The Soviet writer is a militant [chelovek boevoi]” and consequently must focus not on the “how” of his writing, but on the “what”—must not be a “Formalist.” ’ And in closing he made an appeal: “Let us help each other more” “in the cause of creating a Soviet literature.”7 But what exactly did Siao mean by “Soviet literature” and “the Soviet writer?” That is not entirely clear. At times in his speech he used the pronoun “we” to refer to Chinese writers as producers of that literature, at others in reference to writers of the Soviet Union. Part of the confusion comes from the fact that for some years the Chinese under Mao Zedong and Zhu De had been setting up red “soviets” in the Chinese hinterland (a program favored in Soviet policy), and because in Russian “soviet” as an adjective meaning ‘of the Soviet Union’ is always spelled with a

146  Katerina Clark lower-case, the referent is ambiguous here. But what in any case was a Chinese writer doing at a closed Soviet Writers’ Union meeting? Well, he was a member of the Writers’ Union; in fact, he had been a member of its party organization since 1934.8 And since at least 1930 he had worn two hats in assorted Soviet literary bodies. On the one hand, he served as the representative of the Shanghai-based League of Leftist Writers, which had branches throughout China and was at the time the largest intellectual organization of leftists in China. As such, he was the chief intermediary with Soviet literary organizations, arranging publication of Chinese writers’ works, etc. But he was also the representative of the Far Eastern Region (DVK) branch of the Soviet Writers’ Union,9 in other words he represented the area around Vladivostok, the main center for Soviet Chinese population (15% of them lived there) (Siao 1931, 149), and some Chinese writers from there were members of the Writers’ Union.10 The distinctions between the two constituencies that Siao represented at that time are diminished if you see him as a transnational figure operating in a transnational arena and dedicated to the formation of a transnational culture, in his case a Moscow-led one. The reference to “Soviet literature” at the very end of Siao’s speech is not really ambiguous but speaks to a dream of a single cultural space unified by the discourse of Marxism-Leninism or, minimally, by the discourse of anti-imperialism. For him, at its heart would be a single literature that draws on the conventions established in Soviet literature. And he was for reasons of his personal biography particularly suited to his mediating role, to “translating” back and forth between the two literatures. He came to represent the Far East in the Writers Union initially because in 1929, after the Shanghai debacle of 1927 when Chiang Kai Shek’s Nationalist forces routed the communists and began to arrest or imprison them all over the country, he had joined his Soviet wife in Vladivostok, although by 1936 when he made this speech he had moved on to a German wife. Siao not only acquired, successively, wives of different nationalities (in addition to the Russian and German wives, his first and third were Chinese), but also was successively the member of several different national communist parties. In 1922, he first joined the Chinese Communist Party, and then the French Party while working in Paris. Then, after a stint in Belgium and Germany, he was in Soviet Union from 1923 to 1924 where he joined the Soviet Communist Party. He returned to China after that, however, and became a member of the Chinese Communist Party until 1928. When after the Shanghai debacle Siao fled to Russia, he was reinstated in the Soviet Communist Party and was retroactively accredited membership for the years he had been in the Chinese Party, and then in late 1938 Siao returned to China again to help in the effort against the Japanese and rejoined the Chinese Communist Party, having been appointed to the literary section of the Lu Xun Academy of the Arts in Mao’s Yan’an headquarters.11

Translation and Transnationalism 147 One might speculate that Siao was constantly translating himself as he kept changing countries and communist parties, but in fact, there was some continuity in that the Comintern, which played a major role in the attempt to foster a transnational Soviet literature, was also a central factor in Siao’s career. His association with it began in 1922 when the Comintern placed him in its international section of KUTV (the Communist University of the Toilers of the East).12 This institution trained students from all over what we would call the third world and subsequently assigned them for Comintern work, as was the case for Siao. But it also, and this is important for our purposes here, became a place where personal connections and networks were formed of leftist and communist intellectuals which continued long after the individuals had left KUTV, in Siao’s case in 1924. While there, Siao formed in particular friendships with the Indian dramatist Vafa, and the Persian poet Abolqasem Lahuti, who later became the leading writer of Tadzhikistan, as well as the famous Turkish writer Nazim Hikmet.(Sverchevskaia 2001, 11). The latter celebrated him in his well-known poem “The Giaconda and Si-YaU” of 1929, Si-Ya-U being Siao. Siao’s Comintern work in the 1920s had been in the political sphere, but around 1930 he switched to literature (though in his case the distinction between the two spheres was not a radical one). Beginning in 1930, he became a broker and functionary within the sphere of Moscoworiented international literature, especially organizing translations to and from Russian and Chinese. He became a member of the Presidium of the Comintern-sponsored International Organization of Revolutionary Writers, MORP, and sat on the editorial board of Internatsional’naia literatura, and served as editor of its Chinese version;13 he was also elected to the secretariat of the International Association for the Defense of Literature, MORP’s successor after the First International Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture, an international gathering of anti-fascist writers held in Paris in 1935.14 So Siao the writer was a communist and a Comintern activist, and a transnational. But to be a transnational is in a sense to be somehow suspended in what Homi Bhabha describes in The Location of Culture (1994) as an “in-between space,” marked, in Bassnett’s gloss, by constant negotiation, or translation, “between the familiar and the unfamiliar, the known and the other unknown” (Bassnett 2014, 1). And Siao translated literally; his translations include a co-translation of the Internationale into Chinese,15 but also of Chinese fiction into Russian, including a story by Lu Xun. He himself, as was standard for a non-Russian writer who recurrently appeared in Russian translation, had his own translator, Aleksandr Romm, but in his correspondence with Romm, Siao often provided his own translations into Russian of his own poems to help Romm make his.16 And as Siao wandered back and forth in his anti-Formalism speech between discussing Chinese literature and discussing Soviet literature he

148  Katerina Clark also engaged the topic of translation and of translating his own work, commenting “I realized one has to write simply for both Chinese and Soviet readers.” “Simply” was a slogan of the anti-Formalist campaign, but it does characterize his own writing. Some might say in the case of his own poetry it just meant “crudely,” because Siao was not, I must admit, a great poet, in fact some of his verses were little more than collections of slogans. But he seems to have been capable of more. In one of his own translations into Russian, that of Lu Xun’s “Shanghai Impressions of 1933” (“Shankhaiskie vpechatleniia 1933 goda”), published in 1936, the same year as Siao gave his anti-Formalism speech, Siao showed that in translation he was capable of rendering the subtle irony of Lu Xun’s original (Liu Sin’ 1938). However, translation can also be an imperfect tool of communication. In the book that contained Siao’s translation of the Lu Xun story, there also appeared an article by Lu Xun himself in which he addresses the problems of rendering his work in Russian. Here Lu Xun laments that it is almost impossible to convey in Russian the penumbra that certain words and expressions have acquired in 4000 years of Chinese literature, and points out that, moreover, the Chinese writing system with its characters has a strong visual element that is lacking in Russian and so it is impossible to bring out in translation the nuances and associations that the individual characters bear. Translation went, of course, in both directions; large numbers of Soviet texts appeared in Chinese translation. But here the Chinese translators came up against a major problem which had sparked an important controversy in which Siao was engaged: in which version of Chinese and using which writing system should literary texts be rendered. Traditionally, in China, literature had been rendered in an archaic high style of Chinese, but Chinese communists were concerned that it was consequently not reaching the masses and so was not an effective means of agitation. They advocated using some form of the vernacular. But what should be regarded as the vernacular for Chinese? There were two major languages (Mandarin and Cantonese) and many minor ones, not to mention the dialects that most of the lower classes spoke. The Nationalists advocated one version of the vernacular (a modified version of the literary language), the communists a more radically vernacular version— although they also argued against standardization. In a partial gesture in the direction of a heteroglot leftist literature, some writers wrote their texts in two versions, one Mandarin and the other Cantonese. Ironically, while Siao was discrediting the idea that a “single language” should be used in Chinese literature, he was simultaneously advocating what would become a single literary system, Soviet-derived literary conventions that ultimately cohered as socialist realism. His own work could not be considered socialist realist except in the lowest common denominator meaning of the term, as outright propagandist and purveying

Translation and Transnationalism 149 slogans derived from the Soviet platform. Socialist realism itself was, I have argued elsewhere, more a literary system made up of conventions that had at its core a master plot whereby a young and politically immature individual progressed through ever higher stages of political consciousness, a process in which he was aided by some mentor figure who was generally a party official superior to him in the political hierarchy (Clark 2000). This developing tradition of Soviet literary exempla confronted every leftist writer who opposed colonialism and imperialism. They were encouraged, or themselves wanted, to draw on socialist-realist conventions in their own writing. They did not of course enjoy the same constraints and same opportunities for material reward as were the engine driving the widespread adoption of socialist-realist conventions in Soviet Russia. But were a foreign leftist writer to adopt them and translate the conventions into their works he or she would have to mediate between traditional or conventional literary practices of his or her country and the new discourse and conventions. Siao addressed this problem too when in his anti-Formalist speech he contended, We Chinese writers take from this [literary] heritage [with its conventions for representing] landscapes, birds and flowers. That’s a very good thing but we must use all possible means [vsemi putiami] as we strive to make literature a class literature. In other words, the Marxist-Leninist must take priority over the nationally specific. Translation was to be made under conditions of unequal power relations. Susan Bassnett in her book Translation argues that “the notion of transposition is inherent in the very word ‘translation’ which is derived from the Latin translates, the past participle of the verb transferre, meaning to bring or carry across.” (Bassnett 2014, 3). But how perfectly, how literally is it to be carried across? Socialist realism itself could be seen as a translation not of a single text, but of a medley of texts that present authoritative versions of Marxism-Leninism and the party platform distilled in a set of literary conventions. Moreover, violence was done to Marxism-Leninism as it was translated into socialist realism. When, in turn, the conventions of socialist realism were translated into a different textual and cultural system they had to be modified and adapted to fit in. As Edwin Gentzler and Maria Tymoczko have said in their introduction to the collected volume Translation and Power, Translation thus is not simply an act of faithful reproduction but, rather, a deliberate and conscious act of selection, assemblage, structuration, and fabrication—and even, in some cases, of falsification, refusal of information, counterfeiting, and the creation of secret

150  Katerina Clark codes. In these ways translators, as much as creative writers and politicians, participate in the powerful acts that create knowledge and shape culture. (Gentzler and Tymoczko 2002, 3) The question becomes, How did the committed, non-Soviet writers “carry across” the conventions of Soviet socialist realism and incorporate them, translate them into, their vernacular literary systems? Well, of course they always had the option of exposing social ills using what was called critical realism—a perfectly respectable ism in the eyes of the international left. And most opted for that. But not all. In Moscow, the Fourth Rome I discuss the gestures toward socialist realism made by prominent Western writers in their pro-Republican novels of the 1930s about the Spanish Civil War (Clark 2011, Chapter 7). Here I want to look at fiction from the 1930s by non-European writers, more specifically by Mulk Raj Anand and Richard Wright. Both were transnationals in the sense that they operated in two culture systems, in Anand’s case both the Indian and that of England where he lived for 21 years; he became incorporated in English literary life and its institutions, and was a friend of such Modernists as the Woolfs, E. M. Forster, D. H. Lawrence and T. S. Eliot. Anand held a PhD from Oxford and wrote in English; hence he was educated in and wrote in, the language of the hegemonic power (Bassnett 2014, 40). It might seem strange to place Wright in such a context, but in the 1920s and 1930s, the Comintern considered the African Americans as belonging to an oppressed nation and assigned work with them to their Eastern (i.e., Third World) Department. In Wright’s case he might be said to be negotiating between the cultures of two “nations,” the United States and African America, in that, according to the black belt thesis promoted by the Comintern and to which many black intellectuals such as Wright subscribed, African Americans were an oppressed nation awaiting the liberation of its territory (the “black belt” or swathe of Eastern America where the African Americans formed the majority of the population) to form an independent country. Both these writers were leaders in Moscow-affiliated literary organizations of the 1930s; Anand was a founder of the Indian Progressive Writers’ Association (in 1935)17 and Wright an office bearer in the John Reed Club and its successor, the League of American Writers (“Amerika” 1935, 120). Wright was additionally a Communist Party member in the 1930s. Both also had several works published in the 1930s and early 1940s in Russian translation, and conducted a correspondence with editors at Internatsional’naia literatura and officials of the Foreign Commission of the Soviet Writers’ Union, pushing for their texts to be published in the Soviet Union.18 In other words, in the production of these texts they were negotiating not just between two culture systems, as was Siao, but three.

Translation and Transnationalism 151 This triangular orientation was particularly true of Anand whose works were influenced by Anglophone Modernists, on the one hand, particularly by Joyce, and on the other by an essentially Soviet-assigned mentor, Ralph Fox, a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Great Britain (which had since the late 1920s been assigned a supervisory role over the Indian Communist Party) and a Comintern activist. Anand was never a communist. Fox had lived in the Soviet Union three times during the 1920s, the last being in the late 1920s and early 1930s when he had worked in the Marx-Engels Institute. He probably associated with Georg Lukács there.19 Certainly, Ralph Fox’s book, The Novel and the People, an important text in Britain of the 1930s but largely forgotten today, is close to Lukács’ writings on the novel (Williams 2015, 44). Under Fox’s influence, in the 1930s Anand produced a series of novels— Untouchable (1935), Coolie (1936), Two Leaves and a Bud (1937), and The Village (1939)—each of which follows the life trajectory of some boy or young man from well down the economic scale (principally coolies— i.e. unskilled laborers). By focusing on the downtrodden Anand gave his novels a distinct class basis. His villains are not only British occupiers but also members of the new Indian bourgeoisie that the English have recruited to their side with legislation favorable for their enrichment. These novels increasingly engaged the topic of organized resistance and communist trade unions. The hero of Untouchable, and here Anand uses as his model the ending of Maksim Gorky’s play The Lower Depths (Na dne, 1902) is confronted by three different models for how to resolve class inequality in India, but is too naïve politically to choose among them. Starting with the next novel, Coolie, however, each of Anand’s novels feature some figure who acts as a mentor for the more ignorant hero, helping him acquire greater consciousness and galvanizing his outrage at exploitation and the execrable conditions in which he is expected to live, leading him into greater political commitment. But Anand’s heroes never quite become the revolutionaries they are in potential: the hero of Coolie dies of T.B. just when his mentor invites him to work for the Red Flag (communist) trade union; the hero of Two Leaves and a Bud is murdered by a white plantation overseer before he can give expression to a rising political consciousness he has gained from his mentors; and the nonconformism of the hero of The Village forces him to flee from his village; his only recourse to save himself from jail is to join the (British) Indian army, which dispatches him to Europe to fight in the First World War (in the sequel he was to gain greater political consciousness). All four of these novels were proposed for publication in the Soviet Union, and three of them were accepted. The Soviet editors rejected the idea of publishing Untouchable in translation because the graphic descriptions of how its young hero, the eponymous untouchable, goes about his job of cleaning latrines were deemed too naturalistic.20

152  Katerina Clark A second instructive example would be that of Wright, who was published in a number of Soviet journals and newspapers in the 1930s. His two novels of the late 1930s, Uncle Tom’s Children (1938) and Native Son (1940) each came out in Russian translation only a year after they were published in the United States, as Deti diadi Toma (1939) and Syn Ameriki (1941), indicating their importance to authorities in literature (and doubtless to political authorities as well) (Rait 1938a, 1939, 1941). In fact, the completed translation of Uncle Tom’s Children was passed for production on 7 December 1938, the same year as it appeared in America, suggesting that the Russian translation may have been begun before the novel was published in English. As the title of the first of these novels, “Uncle Tom’s Children,” effectively declares, Wright’s fiction of the late 1930s was aimed at superseding Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel. Soviet criticism pronounced that it had done so—“a great step forward in the evolution of Negro literature,” as Aisidor Shneider put it in his article on Wright published in Internatsional’naia literatura in 1938 (this article also formed the basis for his introduction to the Russian translation of Uncle Tom’s Children (Shneider 1939)). Shneider amplifies this remark by claiming, “Richard Wright was the first who managed to provide an image of the American Negro as a communist.” He, Shneider insists, was “one of the first if not the first who does not appeal to the sympathy of white intellectuals but seeks to mobilize the Negro masses” (Shneider 1938, 177). Soviet commentary on Wright consistently claims him as “a writer who has been nurtured by the communist party.”21 One might expect that this “nurturing” would have led Wright to the socialist-realist masterplot, but in fact his literary output of the late 1930s was variegated if viewed from the point of view of Soviet literary conventions. There are, to be sure, works where African Americans progress toward greater political consciousness and recognize the need for collective action, as guided by what are generally identified as “reds.” Two of the stories from Uncle Tom’s Children, “Fire and Cloud” and “Bright Morning Star,” show distinct signs of Soviet influence. “Fire and Cloud” is essentially an illustration of the message that both Wright and his Soviet critics wanted stressed: that the version of African Americans depicted in Uncle Tom’s Cabin as nobly accepting their fate in pious submission to their oppressors had been superseded in a more militant version that presents African Americans as united with whites under the stewardship of the communist movement. The story’s central character is Pastor Taylor, who preaches submission to the whites, despite their brutality, and urges his son not to follow the “reds” ’ program of forceful confrontation with their white oppressors who in this story do nothing to help Taylor’s starving congregation. However, Taylor changes his mind after being brutally beaten and whipped by whites in an arbitrary show of violence. He agrees to a protest march and in the finale addresses a sea of black and white faces of those who stand before him as one.

Translation and Transnationalism 153 “Bright Morning Star,” however, is closer to specific Soviet models of socialist realism. As if to confirm this, the story was particularly favored in the Soviet Union and published in the Pravda popular chap-book series Biblioteka “Ogonëk” with the generous print run of 50,00022 Though the unsigned introduction to this edition describes the African American protagonist of “Bright Morning Star” as living “[i]n the violent hell that the American fascist [sic] descendants of the slave owners have created for the negroes in the Southern states”(Rait 1938b, 3), the story’s general plot is clearly indebted to Gorky’s classic novel Mat’ [Mother] of 1907. As in Mother, the plot of Wright’s story concerns a widowed mother with two sons; one son, a communist activist, has been arrested by the whites and the other, Johnny Boy, is also an activist and is in great danger of being captured and likely killed for trying to organize a meeting of party members. Also as in Mother, this widow, Sue, is progressively drawn away from her deeply religious outlook to eventually become committed to the party, but it is maternal devotion that brings her to this position. The narrator comments: “She loved her son and out of love for him she came to love his cause” (Rait 1938b, 13). As in Mother, she ultimately dies as a martyr for that cause, as does her son. In Wright’s “Bright Morning Star,” there has been some updating to the plot of Mother; his story contains a message of the need for greater “vigilance,” a central party slogan of the late 1930s purge years. A new member of the party turns out to be a traitor. He is white, but that racial trait is not the point; the party members are of both races and Johnny boy himself is in love with a white comrade, Reva, though tragically the two cannot marry under Southern law (Rait 1938b). The mother who was duped by the “traitor” into revealing critical information about a party meeting, thus endangering its members, recognizes that she must kill him before he can give the information to the authorities. She does so even though it costs her her life, as she knew it would. This message of the need for “vigilance” proved to be the key feature of Wright’s text in terms of publishability in the Soviet Union. After it was published as a book two Soviet theatrical adaptations were made based on “Bright Morning Star,” the second actually a radio play for children. Moreover, in both of the specific aspects of Wright’s original story that derive from Gorky’s Mother were omitted as the plot focused on the theme of the political traitor and the need to eradicate him at any cost. The original translation (from Mother) has been retranslated, re-inflected, readjusted in accordance with the political context. Translation, as Gentzler and Tymoczko put it in their remark from Translation and Power cited earlier, is not simply an act of faithful reproduction but, rather, a deliberate and conscious act of selection, assemblage, structuration, and fabrication. In the other Wright stories in Uncle Tom’s Children, and especially in his novel Native Son, one also detects the influence of contemporary American literature and European modernism, as was typical of the

154  Katerina Clark writers from the Harlem Renaissance (Baker 1986, 49), especially of Dreiser’s American Tragedy, a realist novel but scarcely socialist realist, and of Faulkner and Dostoevsky (Goldstein 1994, 23). By the late 1930s when these books by Wright appeared in Russian translation modernism had come to be regarded by Soviet criticism as antithetical to socialist realism, and Dostoevsky was also vilified in authoritative sources. Yet Native Son was a best seller in the Soviet Union. Native Son seems far from following the plot of socialist realism, that is, from presenting an account of the progressive Bildung of the protagonist. Rather, it is structured as a tale of anti-Bildung; the protagonist, the young Afro-American Bigger Thomas, is drawn to ever more heinous acts, going from the unwitting murder of a white communist woman to the savage rape and murder of his pregnant girlfriend. The novel challenges socialist realism not only in its willful reversal of the positive trajectory but also in its assumption that the true proletarian or “oppressed colonial” is perfectible, can be redeemed through revolutionary engagement and communist tutelage. In the character of Bigger, we find some of the potential that commonly marked out the positive hero of the socialist-realist novel for an evolution to the truly positive hero: boundless energy, a rejection of the quiet life (led by his family in this case), of convention, and the status quo. But the oppression of the whites, extending over generations, has taken a tremendous toll on the psyche of the African American and the extreme case represented in Johnny presents a pessimistic picture. This is an African American tragedy. Early in Native Son a young white communist activist, Jan, offers his hand to Johnny, but Johnny at first spurns it. The handshake, the gesture signifying equality and solidarity, but also dialogue and exchange, cannot occur with any spontaneity. There can be no translation. At the end of the novel, as Bigger in prison awaits his execution Jan visits him and waxes lyrical as he presents his vision of a future communistic society where all live in harmony, but Bigger is too preoccupied with his own fate and the situation of the African American to take it all in. He cannot translate the vision into his own world and culture and conversion through a mentor figure does not occur. Bigger’s inability to take the proffered hand in Native Son could be seen as having its analog in Wright’s own career. The inability to shake hands that symbolizes the impossibility of black-white solidarity could be compared with Wright’s increasing sense of the impossibility of incorporating the African American into the communist culture propagated by an increasingly hegemonic Moscow. Though Wright was still nominally a communist, and consequently publishable in the Soviet Union, he was drifting away from Moscow communism and its literary norms. His increasing reservations about communism are, effectively, expressed in a resistance to, a flagrant avoidance of, socialist-realist conventions. The novel provides an inverted “translation” of the central convention of socialist realism.

Translation and Transnationalism 155 I would like to draw on the example of Richard Wright and the textual translations and adaptations surrounding his work to make some concluding remarks. First, that the business of translation in its many forms which was crucial to fostering a transnational, Moscow-oriented “world literature” operated both synchronically, as texts were “carried over” from one culture system or national tradition to another, from the “metropole” to the periphery, and vice versa, and diachronically as they were subject to periodic revisions, appropriations, and re-appropriations. But as Lu Xun pointed out regarding the translation from Chinese into Russian, such a transferal, a “carrying over” is no simple process. And though Siao recurrently established his fealty to official Soviet models, as he demonstrated in his speech to the anti-Formalist meeting, socialist realism was in fact not only about the what, as he insisted it was, but also about the how. Content was effectively subordinated to a ritualized plot sequence and figures like Wright, in applying it to their own compositions, do not seem to have learned the message of humility and self-immolation—the principle of the imitation that Brian James Baer identifies as being so central to the traditions of the Russian intelligentsia in regard to translation (Baer 2016, Chapter 5). They produced “translations” when they cared to do so, that were imperfect, or incomplete, or were willful mistranslations of the original, of the master plot which informs the classic socialist-realist text. As Burton and Hofmeyr have put it in the lines quoted earlier, the networks that supported this transnational project were “both integrated intellectually and perpetually disintegrated by the myriad subjects and agents who constructed, lived inside, and sought to exceed its territorial and epistemological frames” (Burton and Hofmeyr 2014, 23).

Notes 1 Fragments of this work are included in Russian and Soviet Views of Modern Western Art, edited by Ilia Dorontchenkov, translated by Charles Rougle. Berkeley: University of California Press. 2009. French translation: Axionov, Ivan. 2012. Picasso et alentours, traduit du russe par Gérard Conio; préface et notes de Natalia Adaskina; postface de Gérard Conio. Gollion: Infolio. 2 In this respect, it could be seen as distinct from Peter the Great and other tsarist predecessors who likewise sought to “appropriate” Western culture on a large scale. 3 For example, GARF. F. 5283. Op 4. D. 16 (1): “Perepiska s polpredom SSSR v Iaponii Kopp o priezde v Iaponiiu sovetskikh pisatelei Pil’niaka, Vsev. Ivanova” [Correspondence with the plenipotentiary of the USSR in Japan concerning the arrival in Japan of the Soviet writers Pil’niak, Vsevolod Ivanov]. L. 5. 4 For example, GARF. F. 5283. Op. 4 (Turkey). D. 55. LL. 57, 58. 5 Pseudonym of Siao (or Hsiao) San otherwise known as Siao Tzu-chang (1896–1983). Siao took the name Emi while in France in an identification with Émile Zola. 6 See Siao’s address to the Plenum of the International Bureau of Revolutionary Literature [IBRL or MBRL] in October, 1930, a warm-up to the Kharkov conference (Siao 1930).

156  Katerina Clark 7 “Sektsiia kritikov v SSP SSSR. Stenogramma prodolzheniia obshchego sobraniia po voprosu ‘O formalizme v iskusstve’ ot 26 marta 1936 g.” [Section of literary critics of the Union of Soviet Writers. Stenograph of a general meeting on the issue of “Formalism in art”] RGALI. F 631. Op. 18. D. 31. LL. 82, 86, 88. 8 RGASPI. F. 495. Op. 225. D. 96. L. 65. 9 RGALI. F. 631. Op 5. D.61 (2). L. 218. 10 Most of my biographical information on Siao comes from RGASPI. F. 495. Op. 225. D. 96. LL. 58–65, 90, 111–123. 11 RGALI. F. 631. Op. 11. D. 605. L. 31. 12 RGASPI. F. 532. Op. 1. D. 12. L. 73 13 V. Kh, “Siao,” Literaturnaia ėntsiklopediia, vol. xi (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1939), p. 158. 14 RGASPI. F. 495. Op 225. D. 96. 15 RGASPI. F. 495. Op 225. D. 96. L. 29. 16 RGALI. F. 1495. Op 1. D. 131 (Pis’ma Emi Siao (psevd. Siao San’) Rommu, A. I. s prilozheniem avtorskikh postrochnykh perevodov [Letters from Emi Siao (pseudonym for Siao San’) to A. I. Romm with attached interlinear translations made by the author]). 17 Biographical information on Anand comes from Dhawan 1992 and RGALI. F. 631. Op. 14 (Foreign Commission). D. 179 (1937; Svodki; Angliia [1937; Reports; England]) L. 155. 18 RGALI. F. 631. Op 14 (Foreign Commission). D. 179. (1937; Svodki; Angliia [1937; Reports; England]). LL. 5, 7–8, 26–27; RGALI. F. 1397 (“Internatsional’naia literatura” [International literature]). Op 1. D. 681 (perepiska s redaktsiei “Internatsional’naia literatura” o sotrudnichestve Ananda v zhurnale, ob indiiskoi assotsiatsii progressivnykh pisatelei i dr. [correspondence with the editorial board of International literature concerning Anand’s collaboration with the journal, and concerning the Indian Progressive Writers’ Association]); IMLI. F. 75. Op 3. D. 158 (“Ėnand, Melk Rėdzh Pis’mo Dinamovu Sergiu Sergeevichu 8 Avg 1938.” [Anand, Mulk Raj. Letter to Sergei Sergeevich Dinamov 8 Aug. 1938]. 19 RGASPI. F. 495 (Komintern). Op 198. D. 391 (Angliia [England]). LL 1–36. 20 Gurevich, S., “Retsenziia na povest’ Ananda ‘Neprikasaemyi’  ” (1938) [Review of Anand’s story “Untouchable” (1938)]. RGALI. F. 613 (GIKhL). Op. 1. D. 4466. LL. 108–110. 21 For example, in the unsigned introduction to the Biblioteka “Ogonëk” publication of “Utrenniaia zvezda” [Morning star] (Rait 1938b). 22 The print run for Deti diadi Toma was 25,000, considerably better than the 5,000 for McKay’s Domoi v Garlem.

References Archival material GARF (State Archive of the Russian Federation). F. 5283; RGALI (Russian State Archive for Literature and Art). F. 613, F. 631, F. 1397, F. 1495; RGASPI (Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History). F. 495, F. 532; IMLI (Institue of World Literature). F. 75.

Print sources Amerika. 1935. “Amerika: Konferentsiia Dzhon Rid klubov” [America: Conference of John Reed Clubs]. Internatsional’naia literatura 6: 120.

Translation and Transnationalism 157 Baer, Brian James. 2016. Translation and the Making of Modern Russian Literature. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Baker, Houston. 1986. Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bassnett, Susan. 2014. Translation. The New Critical Idiom Series. London and New York: Routledge. Berman, Antoine. 1992. The Experience of the Foreign: Culture and Translation in Romantic Germany. Translated by S. Heyvaert. Albany: SUNY Press. Bhabha, Homi K. 1994. The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge. Burton, Antoinette and Isabel Hofmeyr. 2014. “Introduction: The Spine of Empire: Books and the Making of an Imperial Commons.” In Ten Books That Shaped the British Empire: Creating an Imperial Commons, edited by Antoinette Burton and Isabel Hofmeyr, 1–28. Durham: Duke University Press. Casanova, Pascale. 2007. The World Republic of Letters. Translated by M. B. Debevoise. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Clark, Katerina. 2000. The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual. Third Edn. with new and updated afterword. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Clark, Katerina. 2011. Moscow, the Fourth Rome: Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Evolution of Soviet Culture, 1931–1941. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Cronin, Michael. 2003. Translation and Globalization. New York: Routledge. Dhawan, R. K. 1992. “The Thirties Movement and ‘Coolie.’ ” In The Novels of Mulk Raj Anand, edited by R. K. Dhawan, 54–65. New Delhi: Prestige. Eikhenbaum, Boris. 1924. “O Shatobriane, o chervontsakh i russkoi literature” [About Chateaubriand, ‘chervontsy’ and Russian literature]. Zhizn’ iskusstva 1: 3. Etkind, Alexander. 2011. Internal Colonization: Russia’s Imperial Experience. Cambridge: Polity. Gentzler, Edwin and Maria Tymoczko. 2002. Translation and Power. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Goldstein, Philip. 1994. “From Communism to Black Studies and Beyond: The Reception of Richard Wright’s ‘Native Son.’ ” In Richard Wright’s Native Son, edited by Ana Maria Fraile, 21–36. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. “Kitai: Liga levykh pisatelei Kitaia” [China: The League of Left Writers of China]. 1932. Literatura mirovoi revoliutsii 3: 125. Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. 1848. Manifesto of the Communist Party. Available online: www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ ch01.htm (Accessed 5 January 2017). Pollock, Sheldon. 2006. The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India. Berkeley and London: University of California Press. Rait, Richard [Wright, Richard]. 1938a. “Deti diadi Toma: Big Boi pokidaet dom.” Translated V. Toper. Internatsional’naia literatura 7: 3–85. Rait, Richard [Wright, Richard]. 1938b. Utrenniaia zvezda [Morning Star]. Translated by N. Daruzes, 13. Moscow: Biblioteka “Ogonëk,” Pravda. Rait, Richard [Wright, Richard]. 1939. Deti diadi Toma [Uncle Tom’s Children]. Translated by Vera Toper. Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literature. Rait, Richard [Wright, Richard]. 1941. “Syn Ameriki” [America’s Son = Native Son]. Translated by Evgeniia Kalashnikova. Internatsional’naia literatura 1: 3–44; 2: 4–153.

158  Katerina Clark Safiullina, Naliya and Rachel Platonov. 2012. “Literary Translation and Soviet Cultural Politics in the 1930s: The Role of the Journal ‘Internacional’naja literatura.’ ” Russian Literature 72 (2): 239–269. Sherry, Samantha. 2013. “Better Something than Nothing? The Editors and Translators of ‘Inostrannaia Literatura’ as Censorial Agents.” Slavonic and East European Review 90 (1): 731–754. Shneider, Aisidor. 1938. “Richard Rait” [Richard Wright]. Internatsional’naia literatura 7: 175. Shneider, Aisidor. 1939. “Richard Rait” [Richard Wright]. In Deti diadi Toma [Uncle Tom’s Children], edited by Richard Rait, 5–9. Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura. Siao, Ėmi. 1930. “Zadachi kitaiskoi revoliutsionnoi literatury: K plenumu Mezhdunarodnogo biuro revoliutsionnoi literatury” [The Tasks of Chinese Revolutionary Literature: For the Plenum of the International Bureau of Revolutionary Literature]. Literaturnaia gazeta 48 (19 October): 1. Siao, Ėmi. 1931. “Latinizatsiia kitaiskoi pis’mennosti” [Romanization of Chinese]. Literatura mirovoi revoliutsii 11–12: 149. Sin’, Liu [Lu Xun]. 1938. “Shankhaiskie vpechatleniia 1933 goda” [Shanghai Impressions of 1933]. Translated by Emi Siao. In Liu Sin’ 1881–1936: sbornik statei i perevodov posviashchennyi pamiati velikogo pisatelia sovermennogo Kitaia [Lu Xun 1881–1936: Collected Articles and Translations in Memory of the Great Writer of Contemporary China], edited by Kh. I. Muratov, 178–181. Moscow and Leningrad: Izdatel’stvo Akademii nauk. Sverchevskaia, A. K. 2001. Izvestnyi i neizvestnyi Nazym Khikmet:Materialy k biografii [The Famous and the Unknown Nazim Hikmet: Material for a Biography]. Moscow: Institut Vostokovedeniia RAN. Tagor, Rabindranat [Tagore, Rabindranath]. 1922a. “’Malen’kaia poema v proze,’ perevod M. Tubianskogo: Perevod s bengal’skogo” [A Little Poem in Prose, translated by M. Tubianskii: Translation from Bengali]. In Vostok, Zhurnal literatury, nauki i iskusstva [The East: A Journal of Literature, Science and Art], Book 1, 55–56. Petersburg: Vsemirnaia literatura. Tagor, Rabindranat [Tagore, Rabindranath]. 1922b. Gora [The Mountain]. Translated by Mikhail Tubianskii. Petersburg: Mysl’. Tahir Gürçağlar, Şehnaz. 2008. The Politics and Poetics of Translation in Turkey, 1923–1960. Approaches to Translation Studies. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Tall, Emily. 2004. “The Reception of James Joyce in Russia.” The Reception of James Joyce in Europe: Vol. 1: Germany, Northern and East Central Europe, edited by Geert Lernout and Wim Van Mierlo, 244–257. London and New York: Thoemmes: Continuum. [unsigned]. 1938. “Predislovie.” In Rait, Richard. Utrenniaia zvezda, translated by N. Daruzes, 3. Biblioteka “Ogonëk” 62 (1121). Moscow: Pravda. Vsemirnaia Literatura. 1927. Katalog knig [Catalogue of Books]. Moscow and Leningrad: Gosizdat. Williams, Raymond. 2015. “Cambridge.” In Williams, Raymond. Politics and Letters: Interviews with New Left Review, 39–54. London: Verso.

10 Hemingway’s Transformations in Soviet Russia On the Translation of For Whom the Bell Tolls by Natalia Volzhina and Evgenia Kalashnikova Ekaterina Kuznetsova This is a case study of the only Russian translation of Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, by Natalia Volzhina and Evgenia Kalashnikova. Completed in 1941, the translation was eventually published after numerous attempts only in 1968. During this period, it was edited several times and underwent significant changes. Both the dramatic history of its publication and the different versions of the text available make this translation an interesting example of Soviet translation practice, revealing a wide variety of translatorial and censorial techniques used not just in translating but rather, to use the term of André Lefevere, in rewriting Hemingway’s novel in different contexts. In this respect, the translation by Volzhina and Kalashnikova is not unique. As shown in recent studies (Safiullina and Platonov 2012; Sherry 2010; Sherry 2013), close interaction, even interpenetration of translation and censorship (understood in a wider sense than just as a discrete outside force) is important for understanding Soviet translation practice as such. The case of the Russian For Whom the Bell Tolls provides many examples of such interpenetration. Due to its complex editing history, this text also allows us to examine the major tendencies and strategies guiding textual changes across time, by tracing them from one version to another. But before I turn to the text itself, I will list the different versions and outline the history of its publication. The translation was made in the spring of 1941, one year after the publication of the original work in the United States. By this time, Hemingway’s works were already very popular in Soviet Russia. The first translations of his short stories were published at the end of the 1920s, and in 1934 the translators’ workshop organized by Ivan Kashkin (later one of the most prominent Russian translators and ideologists of the Soviet school of translation) produced the volume Smert’ posle poludnia [Death in the afternoon] (a selection of short stories by Hemingway along with a fragment of the book Death in the Afternoon). From that moment on, other Hemingway translations, including novels, appeared

160  Ekaterina Kuznetsova in Soviet Russia almost yearly. They were made mostly by the Kashkin group and, as contemporary testimony records, became immensely popular (Orlova 1989, 80). At the same time, the Foreign Commission of the Union of Soviet Writers showed increasing interest in Hemingway’s works and activity. In 1936, the vice-president of the Foreign Commission, Mikhail Apletin, sent Hemingway’s biography to the Central Committee of the Party, adding that he considered it both “possible and necessary” to win Hemingway over to the Soviet side.1 The case of Hemingway was not unique for this period and can be seen as a part of the Soviet practice of enrolling foreign authors (see Clark 2011 and David-Fox 2012). During the following four years, the Foreign Commission wrote to Hemingway many times, sending him not only expressions of gratitude for his books and reviews of them but also books and articles to read, including articles by Stalin and Molotov.2 This increasing interest in Hemingway was connected especially (though not exclusively) with his activity during the Spainish Civil War, and in 1939 the Foreign Commission hailed the publication of the Russian translation of The Fifth Column, a play about the Spanish Civil War. For Whom the Bell Tolls, Hemingway’s novel about the Spanish war, which appeared in 1940, had been eagerly awaited in Russia both by readers, who had some appreciation of Hemingway’s books, and by the authorities, who were looking to turn Hemingway into an ally. However, when the novel was published, it turned out be too controversial for this diplomatic purpose. It tells the story of an American volunteer, Robert Jordan, who is ordered to blow up a strategic bridge at the beginning of an attack. The difficulty is that the attack is likely to be organized improperly (and this is finally unmasked), and the whole operation with the bridge threatens to endanger local guerillas who are meant to help Jordan. The orders of the military command are often dubious, and so Jordan has to choose whether to carry out the one he received. For Whom the Bell Tolls is a story of the several days spent by Jordan among the guerillas and of his love of a Spanish girl. It also includes his thoughts and war memories, as well as his memories of other characters, some of whom are related to real people or circumstances. The picture of the war presented, as well as the references to real people, are often ambivalent and sometimes negative.3 Therefore, in Russia the long-awaited novel aroused a great deal of controversy (for instance the Soviet magazine Internatsional’naia literatura republished an indignant letter by the participants of the US Army’s Lincoln Brigade, accusing Hemingway of libel and perversion of facts related to the Spanish War). Still Natalia Volzhina and Evgenia Kalashnikova, two translators from Kashkin’s workshop, were commissioned by the foreign department of Goslitizdat [The State publishing house] to undertake a Russian translation.4 At the same time, however, another translation was being prepared for publication in the literary journal Znamia and was being edited by

Hemingway’s Transformations in Russia 161 Ivan Kashkin. The typescript of this version with corrections made by the translators and the editor is available in the journal’s archive. This version, entitled Robert Dzhordan. (Glavy iz romana “Po kom zvonit kolokol”) [Robert Jordan (Chapters from For Whom the Bell Tolls)], is very much abridged and adapted.5 Out of 43 chapters, 21 are omitted, and the text contains many other cuts and corrections as well. Moreover, while at first it seems the plan was to publish the novel as selected chapters (in the typescript we can see the chapter numbers were crossed out and later changed to hide the deletions), it was eventually made into a continuous text with consecutive numbering. In the archives of Znamia there is also another version of this translation, very similar to the aforementioned one. It is entitled Dva otriada/ V tylu u fashistov [The two troops/ At the rear of the fascists] and has a preface that is dated 23 July 1941. The author of the preface, Ivan Martynov, states that the book would be “useful and interesting for wide circles of Soviet patriots.”6 Yet it was not published for a number of political reasons. To give one example: one of the characters, Karkov, is clearly based on the figure of Soviet- Russian writer and publicist Mikhail Kol’tsov. But Kol’tsov was by then repressed, and so his presence in the original was one reason for suppressing the publication.7 Only after Kol’tsov was rehabilitated following Stalin’s death did publication become possible (Blum 2005, 323). There is evidence, however, that one of these adapted versions circulated in the army during the Second World War (Orlova 1985, 30), and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn mentions reading a samizdat version in Moscow in 1961 (Solzhenitsyn 1975, 23). All of the many later attempts to publish the translation took place after 1955. I will mention only a few of them. In 1962, there was the socalled closed edition distributed among Communist Party leaders according to a special list (Blum 2005, 326). Unfortunately, I could not track this version down. In 1963, the translation with some cuts and corrections (smiagcheniia [softenings], as they were called in party documents) was prepared for publication with the publishing house Khudozhestvennaia literatura (formerly Goslitizdat). The publication failed because Dolores Ibarruri, a famous communist politician and participant in the Spanish war who is portrayed negatively in the novel, and the Communist Party of Spain objected. A section of the proofs is available in the archive of the publishing house.8 The text was edited by well-known Soviet writer and literary functionary Konstantin Simonov and differs stylistically from the 1941 version. In 1968, the novel was at last published in Hemingway’s Collected Works, edited and with a preface by Simonov (Simonov 1968). This version, which still contained more than 20 cuts, was subsequently republished many times. As Hemingway was extremely popular in Soviet Russia, the novel was widely distributed informally before being published.9 I have examined one of these samizdat versions in the archive of the International

162  Ekaterina Kuznetsova Memorial foundation.10 It is the most (though not entirely) complete version available, and stylistically it is close to the version made in 1941. Therefore, I consider it the version closest to the early uncensored variant of the translation, although because it was reprinted and distributed by many people, many changes could have been made. For the Russian translator, For Whom the Bell Tolls presented at least two major challenges. The first challenge was the contemporaneity of the novel. Based on a recent civil war in which Soviet participants were involved, and often referring to real prototypes and facts, the novel could hardly be approached as purely a work of fiction, even if we put the question of censorship aside. All this provoked the reader to treat the book to a large extent as a non-fictional account. The second challenge was purely stylistic in nature. In For Whom the Bell Tolls Hemingway constructs a peculiar “Spanish” English using old words and specific grammatical structures, making this another problem for the translator to resolve. As for the first challenge, it seems that the way the characters speak about the Spanish Civil War was too detached and ambivalent for the translators. They chose to make it more explicit. For example, the characters often refer to “the cause” they support. As in Russian there are no articles, the translators used attributes to define this cause, and these attributes sound tangibly more expressive and clear than in the original wording. In place of “the cause,” we have “our cause,” or “common cause,” or “our common cause.” Here is an example from a conversation between Robert Jordan and Anselmo: “I do not like to kill men.” “Nobody does except those who are disturbed in the head,” Robert Jordan said. “But I feel nothing against it when it is necessary. When it is for the cause.” (Hemingway 2005, 42) “—Ia ne lubliu ubivat’ liudei. —Etogo nikto ne liubit, razve te, u kogo v golove neladno,—skazal Robert Dzhordan.—No ia ne protiv, kogda eto neobkhodimo. Kogda eto radi obshchego dela.” (Samizdat version)11 [“I do not like to kill men.” “Nobody does except those who are disturbed in the head,” Robert Jordan said. “But I feel nothing against it when it is necessary. When it is for the common cause.”] These are almost set expressions, similar to the clichés that were widely used in the Soviet press. When “our common cause” is mentioned there is no need to explain that it is always good and just and closely associated with the ideals of communism. Examples of this kind can also be found

Hemingway’s Transformations in Russia 163 in the samizdat version, the one that is presumably the earliest variant of the text. In the published version these examples sound even more dramatic. The cause is something you fight for: “Kill him now,” the gypsy urged. “That is to assassinate.” “Even better,” the gypsy said very softly. “Less danger. Go on. Kill him now.” “I cannot in that way. It is repugnant to me and it is not how one should act for the cause.” (Hemingway 2005, 64) “—Ubei ego seichas. —Eto budet ubiistvo iz-za ugla. —Tem luchshe,—skazal tsygan.—Nu zhe. Ubei ego. —Ia tak ne mogu. Eto podlo i te, kto boretsia za obshchee delo, tak ne postupaiut.” (Samizdat version) [“Kill him now.” “That is to assassinate.” “Even better,’ the gypsy said. Go on. Kill him now.”12 ‘I cannot in that way. It is mean and those who fight for the common cause don’t act in this way.”] “—Ubei ego seichas,—nastaival tsygan. —Eto budet ubiistvo iz-za ugla. —Tem luchshe,—skazal tsygan sovsem tikho.—Risku menshe. Nu? Ubei ego. —Ia tak ne mogu. Eto podlo, a tem, kto boretsia za nashe obshchee delo, podlost’ ne k litsu.” (Kheminguei 1968, 173) [“Kill him now,” the gypsy urged. “That is to assassinate.” “Even better,” the gypsy said very softly. “Less danger. Go on. Kill him now.” “I cannot in that way. It is mean, and meanness doesn’t suit those who fight for our common cause.”] That was apparently a more natural way of speaking about the conflict, and it removed any ambivalence. As for the challenge of style, I have oral evidence from a person who knew Natalia Volzhina that when Volzhina translated For Whom the Bell Tolls she didn’t recognize Spanish English as a special technique. Still, as the earlier versions show, there were other stylistic effects that the translators failed to recognize. In the earlier versions the translators were likely to reproduce these effects, though not consistently, to some extent

164  Ekaterina Kuznetsova foreignizing the text, to use Lawrence Venuti’s term (Venuti 1995). Неre are some examples: “The woman of Pablo said nothing and went on blowing up the coals of the fire” (Hemingway 2005, 53). “Zhenshchina Pablo ne govorila ni slova i vse razduvala mekhami ogon’ v ochage.”(Version 1941)13 [“The woman of Pablo said nothing and went on blowing up the coals of the fire.”] “Zhena Pablo ne govorila ni slova i vse razduvala mekhami ogon’ v ochage.” (Version 1968) (Kheminguei 1968, 161) [Pablo’s wife said nothing and went on blowing up the coals of the fire.] There is obviously an attempt here to reproduce the absence of distinction between “woman” and “wife.” The original imitates the Spanish, in which there is no such distinction. In later versions of the translation, this solution was abandoned, however, probably because it might have sounded ambiguous. Here is another example from Version 1941, representing an attempt to reproduce an unusual syntactic structure: “I explain very carefully so that you understand and that you understand all of the possible difficulties and the importance”| (Hemingway 2005, 8). “Ia vse podrobno staraius’ obiasnit’, chtoby vy poniali i chtoby vy iasno predstavili vse vozmozhnye trudnosti i vse znachenie.14” (Version 1941) [“I try to explain everything carefully so that you understand and that you imagine clearly all of the possible difficulties and all the importance.”] Leaving the word “importance” as it is, without an object sounds strange to the Russian ear. However, later versions show a more domesticating approach to treating such stylistic effects. In 1968 we see in the same passage “the importance of this cause.” The text becomes smoother, which as the proofs show was likely to be the result of choices made by its second editor, Konstantin Simonov. In addition to these initial choices made by the translators and editors, there were various censorship-related corrections that shaped the Russian text. In the case of For Whom the Bell Tolls, such censorial interference can be considered not just as an outside force but rather as reflecting a special kind

Hemingway’s Transformations in Russia 165 of coordination between the translator and the censor. As the proofs of the 1941 version show, it looks like the translators and editors worked in concert to construct a text within a given set of limits. While these limits seem to be very rigid, in some cases the translators and the editor could decide whether a certain scene was necessary for the text or not. Their remarks can be found in the margins. For example, the erotic scenes are marked as “porno,” although some of them are left in. But they also debated over less erotic passages, such as the following, where Jordan takes Maria by the hand: Maria sidela riadom i cherez plecho smotrela na ego rabotu. On znal, chto Pablo sidit naprotiv i ostal’nye tozhe zdes’, razgovarivaiut i igraiut v karty; on vdykhal vozdukh peshchery, v kotorom zapakh striapni i pishchi smenilsia dymnym chadom i zapakhom cheloveka— tabak, vinnyi peregar i nechistyie ispareniia tela,—a kogda Maria, sledia za ego karandashom, polozhila na stol ruku, on vzial ee svoiei levoi ruloi, podnes k litsu i vdokhnul svezhii zapakh vody i prostogo myla, shedshii ot nee posle mytiia posudy. Potom on polozhil ee ruku i snova vzialsia za rabotu, ne gliadia na nee i potomu ne vidia, kak ona pokrasnela. Ona ostavila ruku na stole, riadom s ego rukoi, no on ee bol’she ne trogal.15 Maria sat beside him and looked over his shoulder while he worked. He was conscious of Pablo across the table and of the others talking and playing cards and he smelled the odors of the cave which had changed now from those of the meal and the cooking to the fire smoke and man smell, the tobacco, red-wine and brassy, stale body smell, and when Maria, watching him finishing a drawing, put her hand on the table he picked it up with his left hand and lifted it to his face and smelled the coarse soap and water freshness from her washing of the dishes. He laid her hand down without looking at her and went on working and he could not see her blush. She let her hand lie there, close to his, but he did not lift it again. (Hemingway 2005, 234) Part of the text was crossed out in the proofs, but then in the margins it was written that such passages balanced out the erotic ones and that otherwise they were too annoying and sentimental. In the end, the passage was allowed to remain, but the discussion is significant. It shows that the translating process may be considered as a specific kind of collective work. The censorship-related interference in the text did not mean just cutting out unacceptable passages. Rather it can be described as a part of the rewriting process, using the term of André Lefevere (1992). It also confirms the observations made by Samantha Sherry regarding the complicated nature of Soviet censorship, which might include translators and editors and was not limited to removing certain passages. As Sherry argues, “rather than being an externally applied action which only

166  Ekaterina Kuznetsova removes and destroys the original meaning, censorship may be located within the act of textual re-production and be a productive force” (Sherry 2010, 5). In addition to excision, other censorial techniques were used to conceal what was deemed to be unacceptable. Here I would like to consider two points. First, we can see that the cuts or the so-called softenings could change the meaning of the text that remained. This is what we see in Version 1941, which presents the story of a guerilla troop without any reference to the broader context of the war. Almost all mentions of the command were cut. From this plotline, only one character, Golz, was left, but his role was merely functional; he simply gave an order to Jordan. In the passage: “When a thing is wrong something’s bound to happen. You were bitched when they gave Golz those orders” (Hemingway 2005, 488)16—“Golz” is crossed out and changed to “you.” The hint that the order from the high command might have been unreasonable had to be omitted. Accordingly, the attack in the beginning for which Jordan has to blow up the bridge is not unmasked, and so it is not doomed to failure, as there is no mention of it. The character is doomed to die but there is still hope for victory, and there is no doubt his death was for a purpose. Generally, the tone of the book becomes more definite and optimistic. Here is another significant correction: “Pochti tselyi god ia dralsia za to, vo chto veril. Esli my pobedim zdes’, my pobedim vezde. Mir—khoroshee mesto, i za nego stoit dratsia, i mne ochen’ ne khochetsia ego pokidat.”17 “I have fought for what I believed in for a year now. If we win here we will win everywhere. The world is a fine place and worth fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.” (Hemingway 2005, 485) The Spanish war is lost, and there is no need to draw attention to it. That is probably the reason Jordan’s thought “if we win here, we will win everywhere” was cut. In later versions, there is no such extensive interference in the plot, but the same technique of removing text that changes the meaning of the larger passage is used locally. Here is one example, in which Jordan describes Lister, a communist military officer: They were Communists and they were disciplinarians. The discipline that they would enforce would make good troops. Lister was murderous in discipline. He was a true fanatic and he had the complete Spanish lack of respect for life. In a few armies since the Tartar’s first invasion of the West were men executed summarily for as little reason as they were under his command. But he knew how to forge a division into a fighting unit. (Hemingway 2005, 242–243)

Hemingway’s Transformations in Russia 167 Oni byli communistami i storonnikami zheleznoi distsipliny. Distsiplina, nasazhdaemaia imi, sdelaet iz ispantsev khoroshikh soldat. Lister byl osobenno strog naschet distsipliny, i on sumel vykovat iz divizii nastoiashchuiu boesposobnuiu edinitsu. (Kheminguei 1968, 359) [“They were communists and supporters of iron discipline. The discipline that they would enforce would make Spanish people good soldiers. Lister was especially strict in discipline, and he managed to forge a division into a fighting unit.”] The meaning of the passage has changed to the opposite. Still in later versions, the cuts affect not so much the plot itself but rather certain information concerning the communists, Soviet participation in the war, etc., or they remove some coarse expressions. The second purpose of the censorial interventions was to make the text clearer. It seems the representation of the war in the novel was considered to be too ambivalent and indefinite. In 1941, this ambivalence became the object of rewriting. The difference between the two sides of the conflict is made more distinct, polarized. There is even a tendency to divide the characters into positive and negative ones, and to make the positive ones even more positive. It is predictable that, for instance, in this version there is no massacre of Franco’s Guardia Civil organized by the Republicans. The same tendency shows itself in smaller details. In the translation of the following passage, some of the text is crossed out in the typescript: “On posmotrel skvoz’ derevia, tuda, gde Primitivo, derzha loshad’ pod uzdtsy, vysvobozhdal nogu kavalerista iz stremeni. Ubityi visel, utknuvshis’ litsom v sneg, i Robert Dzhordan uvidel, kak Primitivo obsharivaiet ego karmany. —Ei!—kriknul on.—Vedi loshad’ siuda.”18 He looked through the trees to where Primitivo, holding the reins of the horse, was twisting the rider’s foot out of the stirrup. The body lay face down in the snow and as he watched Primitivo was going through the pockets. “Come on,” he called. “Bring the horse.” (Hemingway 2005, 276) A positive hero cannot go through the pockets of a dead man. Later the scene where Jordan thinks rather sympathetically of the soldier he killed is removed, as is the scene where Pilar, wife of a guerilla leader, jokes about the Republican flag. Accordingly, Raphael the gypsy cannot leave his post, etc. Some of these decisions were, however, debated, as evident in the edited passages that follow: “—Maria,—skazal on i triakhnul devushku za plecho, chtoby ona prosnulas’.—Spriachsia v meshok.—On zastegnul odnoi rukoi vorot

168  Ekaterina Kuznetsova rubashki, a drugoi skhvatilsia za revol’ver, opustiv predokhranitel’ bol’shim paltsem. On videl, kak strizhenaia golova devushki nyrnula v meshok, a potom uvidel vsadnika, vyiezzhaiushchego iz-za derev’iev.”19 “Maria,” he said, and shook the girl’s shoulder to waken her. “Keep thyself under the robe,” and he buttoned his shirt with one hand and held the automatic pistol in the other loosening the safety catch with his thumb. He saw the girl’s cropped head disappear with a jerk under the robe and then he saw the horseman coming through the trees.” (Hemingway 2005, 274) The translators and the editor pondered whether to leave the girl in the character’s sleeping bag or not. It probably seemed not quite morally acceptable. At last, however, it was decided not to cut the girl out. As for Jordan, a major part (though not all) of his thoughts are omitted, making him less complicated and more resolute. This tendency to simplify and clarify characters and situations is seen mainly in the 1941 version. Later versions are much more ambiguous, though this tendency is still evident in isolated passages. Cuts are used in the case of some communist characters; for instance, Karkov, as a Soviet journalist can have neither a mistress nor a second wife. There is also another tendency in altering the source text. The contemporaneity of the novel forced the translators to read different aspects or parts of the text as more or less significant. In 1941, this led to different textual changes, which were made to draw attention to a certain remark. For example, there is a scene in the novel where one of the characters, a boy, mourns his relatives. To comfort him, Maria kisses him, according to her, as a sister, and Jordan adds, “We are all brothers.” Originally, these words do not conclude the dialogue, and the boy does not pay much attention to them. But the translators made a significant cut, added a chapter break and a remark by Pilar: “Verno,—skazala Pilar i zashagala vpered” [Yes, we are, said Pilar and marched on].20 Jordan’s remark was put therefore almost at the end of the chapter, and while in the original it could be lost in the dialogue, in the Russian text it sounded much more definite. In later versions, this tendency to highlight certain themes does not influence the text itself as much. Still, the attempt to draw attention to particular aspects of the novel can be found in the preface. The list of these aspects is rather significant though predictable, including almost all of the more controversial points, such as the luxury of the Gaylord’s hotel, the opinion of the characters regarding Dolores Ibarurri, la Passionaria, erotic scenes and the love story (highly valued by Simonov), and so on. The preface functioned very much as a so-called parovoz [locomotive], explaining ideologically ambiguous points and thus making the

Hemingway’s Transformations in Russia 169 publication possible, but it did more than that. For instance, the proofs show that initially Simonov wrote about the repressions taking place in the Soviet Union, which are mentioned in the novel.21 The passage about repressions was ultimately censored, but the fact that Simonov had hoped to mention it suggests that the limits of Soviet censorship were not so clearly fixed. The 1941 version and later versions of the text show many of the same tendencies, but in the 1941 version, these tendencies affected the text much more deeply, significantly altering the meaning of the relevant passages; later they were used more locally, as in the following example from the 1968 version: You never think about only girls. I never think at all. Why should I? I am Général Sovietique. I never think. Don’t try to trap me into thinking.’ Some one of his staff, sitting on a chair working over a map on a drawing board, growled at him in the language Robert Jordan did not understand. (Hemingway 2005, 10) Vy dumaete ne tolko o devushkakh, a i o mnogom drugom. A ia voobshche ni o chem takom ne dumaiu. Na chto mne? Odin iz shtabnykh ofitserov, sklonivshiisia nad kartoi, prikolotoi k chertezhnoi doske, provorchal chto-to na iazyke, kotorogo Robert Dzhordan ne ponimal. (Kheminguei 1968, 117) [You think not only about girls, but also about many other things. But I think about nothing of the sort at all. Why should I?’ Some one of his staff, sitting on a chair working over a map on a drawing board, growled at him in the language Robert Jordan did not understand.] In later versions, the cuts and other censorial techniques do not significantly alter the plot, the representation of the war is allowed to remain more ambiguous, and the characters are not divided so neatly into good and bad. Still, as mentioned earlier, the later version is stylistically less expressive. Maybe it was a matter of taste on the part of Simonov, the editor. Another reason might be that 1941 was an early stage in the introduction of Hemingway into Russian culture, and his popularity was connected in a significant way to his reputation as a stylist, while in 1963 and 1968, after his death, he was published almost as a classic. If we compare earlier and later versions there seem to be two basic strategies. The version of 1941 may be considered an attempt to ideologically

170  Ekaterina Kuznetsova domesticate and appropriate the novel, making Hemingway an ally in accordance with the plans of the Foreign Commission of the Union of Soviet Writers. The novel became more distinctly a story of one character, Robert Jordan, who was presented to the reader not so much as “the other” with his own worldview and his own values, but rather as a kindred spirit. But if on the ideological level the otherness of the character was not permissible, it was still acceptable on the stylistic level, and that was important. We see an attempt to ideologically adapt the book and at the same time to reproduce its stylistic effects. In the later versions, we encounter a different approach. Here it is the otherness of both Jordan and Hemingway that is stressed. The tendency to treat the novel rather like a report became the dominant stylistic approach (although Simonov objected to this practice in his preface), but it concerned only certain themes and passages. Jordan didn’t need to be a kindred spirit anymore (although as various memoirs attest, he was to many readers). He just had to be acceptable. While the earliest version prepared for publication seems to be an attempt to ideologically appropriate the novel, the officially published one is a result of compromises. Thus, the consecutive versions of one text show a significant change in the transforming tendencies. Certainly, the case of the Russian For Whom the Bell Tolls is unique in its way. Yet in many aspects, it is quite typical for Soviet translation and publishing practices. Difficulties with publishing, various censorshiprelated corrections, the tendency to avoid ambivalence and ambiguity, all this can be found in other translations published in the USSR. In other words, Hemingway’s novel underwent changes that many other books underwent. Its outstanding feature, however, is having undergone so many changes at different times in its complicated publication history.

Notes 1 RGALI (Russian State Archive for Literature and Art). F. 631. Op. 14. D. 1045. L. 3. 2 RGALI. F. 631. Op. 11. D. 102. L. 1–21. 3 As Maurice Friedberg notes, “The novel was vulnerable to intervention by the soviet censorship because both its author and its central protagonist Robert Jordan display occasional irreverence—not antipathy, but irreverence— when commenting on Communism and the Communists, and als because it contains information that is at variance with the official Soviet version of the history of the Spanish Civil War” (Friedberg 1977, 43). Friedberg goes on to offer some examples of that censorial intervention as reflected in the translation published in the 1968 edition of Hemingway’s collected works (see Friedberg 1977, 43–46). Friedberg at the time did not have access to the pre-published variants examined in this chapter. 4 Later, Kalashnikova mentioned it to Raisa Orlova, and it is from Orlova’s memoirs that we know the translation was commissioned. Orlova also writes that the translation was prepared for publication in Goslitizdat, although I could not find any page-proofs to confirm that (Orlova 1989, 88).

Hemingway’s Transformations in Russia 171 5 RGALI. F. 618. Op. 12. D. 77; RGALI. F. 618. Op. 12. D. 78; RGALI F. 618. Op. 12. D. 79; RGALI. F. 618. Op. 12, D.80. 6 RGALI. F. 618. Op. 2. D. 71. L. 1. 7 For more on Kol’tsov and his transnational activities, see Clark 2011, 242–275. 8 RGALI. F. 613. Op. 10. D. 5237. 9 For more on Hemingway’s popularity in the USSR, see Burak 2013, 50–72. 10 Arkhiv Mezhdunarodnogo obshchestva “Memorial”. F. 175. Op.1. D. 31. 11 Arkhiv Mezhdunarodnogo obshchestva “Memorial”. F. 175. Op. 1. D. 31. L. 30. 12 Arkhiv Mezhdunarodnogo obshchestva “Memorial”. F 175. Op. 1. D. 31. L. 46. 13 RGALI. F. 618, Op. 12. D. 77. L 46. 14 RGALI. F. 618. Op. 12. D. 7. L.8 15 RGALI. F.618. Op. 12. D.78. L2. 16 RGALI. F.618. Op. 12. D. 78. L. 135. 17 RGALI. F.618. Op. 12. D. 78. L. 132. 18 RGALI. F.618. Op. 12. D. 78. L. 8. 19 RGALI. F.618. Op. 12. D.78. L.6. 20 RGALI. F.618. Op. 12. D. 77. L. 99. 21 See RGALI. F 613. Op. 10. D. 5237. L.33–34. The passage concerning repressions is crossed out; later, in the published version (1968), it was omitted.

References Archival material RGALI (Russian State Archive for Literature and Art). F. 618. Op. 2. D 71. [Translation by Natalia Volzhina and Evgenia Kalashni­ kova]. Dva otriada (V tylu u fashistov). Perevod glav romana E. Khemingueia s angliiskogo iazyka. [Two troops (In the rear of the fascists). Chapters from a novel by E. Hemingway translated from English]. 1941. F. 618. Op. 12. D. 77. Kheminguei, Ernst. Robert Dzhordan (Po kom zvonit kolokol). Roman. Perevod N. Volzhinoi i E. Kalashnikovoi s angliiskogo iazyka. Chast’ I. [Hemingway, Ernest. Robert Jordan (For whom the bell tolls). Novel. Translated from the English by N. Volzhina and E. Kalashnikova. Part I]. 1941. F. 618, Op. 12, D. 78. Kheminguei, Ernst. Robert Dzhordan (Po kom zvonit kolokol). Roman. Perevod N. Volzhinoi i E.Kalashnikovoi s angliiskogo iazyka. Chast’ II. [Hemingway, Ernest. Robert Jordan (For whom the bell tolls). Novel. Translated from the English by N. Volzhina and E. Kalashnikova. Part II]. 1941. F. 618. Op. 12. D. 79. Kheminguei, Ernst. Robert Dzhordan (Po kom zvonit kolokol). Roman. Perevod N. Volzhinoi i E.Kalashnikovoi s angliiskogo iazyka. Chast’ I. [Hemingway, Ernest. Robert Jordan (For whom the bell tolls). Novel. Translated from the English by N. Volzhina and E. Kalashnikova. Part I]. 1941. F. 618. Op. 12. D. 80. Kheminguei, Ernst. Robert Dzhordan (Po kom zvonit kolokol). Roman. Perevod N. Volzhinoi i E.Kalashnikovoi s angliiskogo iazyka. Chast’ II. [Hemingway, Ernest. Robert Jordan (For Whom the Bell Tolls). Novel. Translated from the English by N. Volzhina and E. Kalashnikova. Part I]. 1941.

172  Ekaterina Kuznetsova F. 613. Op. 10. D. 5237. Kheminguei, Ernest. Po kom zvonit kolokol. Roman. Perevod s angliiskogo N. Volzhinoi i E. Kalashnikovoi. Chast’ verstki s pravkoi perevodchikov i redaktora [Hemingway, Ernest. 1963. For Whom the Bell Tolls. Novel. Translated from the English by N. Volzhina and E. Kalashnikova Part of the proofs with corrections of the translators and the editor]. 1963. F. 631. Op. 11. D. 102. Pis’ma Inostrannoi komissii SSP Ernestu Khemingueiu . . . [Letters of the Foreign Commission of the Union of Soviet Writers to Ernest Hemingway]. 1936–1940. F. 631. Op.14. D. 1045. Svedeniia o zhizni i tvorchestve E. Khemingueia. Spravka sostavlena dlia Alekseia Angarova [Information concerning Ernest Hemingway’s life and works. Written for Aleksei Angarov]. 1936. Arkhiv Mezhdunarodnogo obshchestva “Memorial” (Archive of the International society “Memorial”). F. 175. Op. 1. F. 31. Kheminguei, Ernest. Po kom zvonit kolokol [Hemingway, Ernest. For whom the bell tolls]. Samizdat typescript, not dated.

Print sources Blum, Arlen. 2005. “Tri tsenzurnykh episoda iz zhizni Internatsional noi literatury” [Three censorial cases concerning magazine Internatsionalnaya literarura]. Inostrannaia literatura 10: 313–326. Burak, Alexander. 2013. “The ‘Americanization’ of Russian Life Through Translations of Hemingway’s Works.” Translation and Interpreting Studies 8 (1): 50–72. Clark, Katerina. 2011. Moscow, the Forth Rome: Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Evolution of Soviet Culture, 1931–1941. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. David-Fox, Michael. 2012. Showcasing the Great Experiment: Cultural Diplomacy and Western Visitors to the Soviet Union, 1921–1941. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. “ ‘Dokumenty svidetel’stvuiut’ . . . Iz fondov khraneniia sovremennoi dokumentatsii: O pisatele Erneste Khemingueie [Documentary evidence: From the Contemporary documentation center: Concerning Ernest Hemingway].” 1993. Voprosy literatury 2: 234–253. Friedberg, Maurice. 1977. A Decade of Euphoria: Western Literature in PostStalin Russia, 1954–64. Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press. Hemingway, Ernest. 2005. For Whom the Bell Tolls. London: Vintage. Kheminguei, Ernest. 1968. “ ‘Po kom zvonit kolokol’: Perevod N. Volzhinoi i E. Kalashnikovoi” [For Whom the Bell Tolls: Translated by N. Volzhina and E. Kalashnikova]. In Kheminguei, Ernest. Sobraniie sochinenii. V 4-kh t [Collected writings in 4 volumes]. Vol. 3, edited by K. Simonov, 107–612. Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura. Lefevere, André.1992. Translation, Rewriting, and the Manipulation of Literary Fame. London: Routledge. Orlova, Raisa. 1985. Kheminguei v Rossii: Roman dlinoiu v polstoletiia [Hemingway in Russia: A romance that lasted half of a century]. Ann Arbor: Ardis. Orlova, Raisa. 1989. “Russkaia sud’ba Khemingueia” [The Russian Fate of Hemingway]. Voprosy literatury 6: 77–107.

Hemingway’s Transformations in Russia 173 “Protest uchastnikov brigady Linkol’na protiv knigi Khemingueia” [Participants of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Protesting Against Hemingway’s Book]. 1940. Internatsional’naia literatura 11–12: 364. Safiullina, Nailya and Rachel Platonov. 2012. “Literary Translation and Soviet Cultural Politics in the 1930s: The Role of the Journal ‘Internatsional’naja literature.’ ” Russian Literature LXXII (2): 239–269. Sherry, Samantha. 2010. “Censorship in Translation in the Soviet Union: The Manipulative Rewriting of Howard Fast’s Novel The ‘Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti.’ ” Slavonica 16: 1–14. Sherry, Samantha. 2013. “Better Something than Nothing? The Editors and Translators of ‘Inostrannaia Literatura’ as Censorial Agents.” Slavonic and East European Review 90 (1): 731–754. Simonov, Konstantin. 1968. “Ispanskaia tema v tvorchestve Khemingueia.” [The Spanish Theme in Hemingway’s Works]. In Kheminguei, Ernest: Sobraniie sochinenii. V 4-kh t. [Collected Writings, In 4 volumes] III, edited by K. Simonov, 5–16. Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literature. Solzhenitsyn, Aleksander. 1975. Bodalsia telenok s dubom: Ocherki literaturnoi zhizni [The Calf Butts Against the Oak: Sketches of a Literary Life]. Paris: YMCA. Venuti, Lawrence. 1995. The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation. London and New York: Routledge.

11 Soviet Folklore as Translation Project The Case of Tvorchestvo Narodov SSSR, 19371 Elena Zemskova As stated by Evgeny Dobrenko, multinational Soviet literature was “found in translation” (Dobrenko 2011). In the 1930s, translated literature of “the peoples of the Soviet Union” was, to use the terms of Itamar Even-Zohar (1990), shifting from a peripheral position to a central one in the Soviet literary polysystem. Translations of folk epics and contemporary poetry glorifying the new Soviet regime and its leader occupied the front pages of central newspapers and filled the editing plans of the state publishing houses. What distinguished this development from the cases described by Even-Zohar, however, was the fact that the source languages for translated literature were not “foreign” to the polysystem in the strict sense of the word. As the new Soviet state declared itself to be multinational and multilingual, literary translation became not only a process of transfer from the outside but also within the literary system. Pre-revolutionary Russian literature created primarily as a national one was now replaced by the literature of the Soviet empire.2 Susanna Witt observes that translations in the Soviet imperial space were “principally carried out in double directions” (Witt 2013b, 256), not only from Russian into minor imperial languages, but also vice versa, which contradicts traditional imperial translation flows from a dominating language into a dominated one. The Soviet “affirmative action empire” (Martin 2001) practiced and encouraged translations from the languages of very different ethnic groups. Because such translations were believed to contribute to the ideological unification of the empire, most translation projects were initiated by central institutions, such as party newspapers and state publishing houses. At the same time, however, party authorities in the republics, Writers’ Unions, and other agents actively promoted translations to further their own political interests at the all-Union level. This chapter focuses on a specific translation project initiated in Moscow that came from the very center of the Soviet ideological machine, the newspaper Pravda. This fact significantly influenced the very nature of the project and the work of the translators. And while the project offers important insight into the role of translation in the workings of Soviet

Soviet Folklore 175 politics and culture, the conclusions about translation strategies that will be drawn from this case study should not be extrapolated to other cases without further research.

Introduction to the Case Study The anthology Tvorchestvo narodov SSSR [Works of the Peoples of the USSR] (Gor'kii and Mekhlis 1937), prepared for the twentieth anniversary of the Revolution of 1917, was published at the end of 1937, and in 1938 two reprints followed in the total print run of 145,000 copies. The volume boasted an outstanding print quality—it was a quarto with heavy paper and numerous illustrations that included photographs of various objects of folk art, such as embroidery, woodcarving, and wooden sculpture. The first two illustrations—the photographs of Turkmen handmade carpets portraying Lenin and Stalin—were in color. The book contained 255 texts in a variety of folkloric genres, mostly poetic, but the volume featured prose narratives as well. The texts were arranged in five sections according to their subject: Lenin, Stalin, the Revolution, the Civil War, and the Soviet Way of Life. Out of the 255 texts, seventy-one—or less than one-third—were originally written in Russian, whereas the rest were marked as translations. The very choice of national languages for translation and the number of texts translated from each of those languages give us a glimpse of the hierarchy of nations, institutionalized in the Soviet epoch, where some nations were granted quasi-independent status as Soviet Republics while others received only the subordinate status of “autonomous republics.” As mentioned earlier, the Russian language is represented in the volume by the largest number of texts. It is followed by the Ukrainian language—the anthology contains 37 texts translated from Ukrainian, reflecting the vision of the Ukrainian nation as “a younger brother” of the Russian nation. Then come the languages of the Soviet Republics where a secular written tradition was established before the Revolution, as it was in both Russia and Ukraine. There are 13 translations from Belorussian, 12 from Armenian, and 12 from Georgian. Translations from the Kazakh language, however, outnumbered translations from other languages in the volume, which certainly corresponded to the fact that in 1936 poetic translations from Kazakh were the most common in the newspaper Pravda (Witt 2013a, 147) and in terms of general popularity. Thanks to the figures of Kazakh folk poets (akyns) and especially Dzhambul Dzhabaev, Kazakh folklore moved into the very foreground of an increasingly orientalized Soviet culture (Bogdanov, Nikolozi, and Murashov 2013). The rest of the Republics were represented by far fewer translations: seven translations from Tajik, eight from Turkmen, and eight from Azerbaijani. Only six texts were translated from the languages of the Caucasus and Volga regions. The peoples of the North and the Altai

176  Elena Zemskova region were represented by one or two translations. It is noteworthy that in the table of contents at the end of the volume, information was provided not only about the source language of each text but also about the place where it was recorded. For instance, it was indicated that the opening text in the section “Lenin,” titled “The Golden Dawn Has Broken” and subtitled “A Legend of Oirots,” was “written down in 1934 from the words of Daaba Iudakov of Ailu settlement in Elekmonar Aikam, Oirot Autonomous Republic” (Gor'kii and Mekhlis 1937, 574). Thus, not only did the edition give an idea of the linguistic and ethnic diversity of the empire but also marked particular places on its map. While the names of those who performed the texts and who, according to tradition, should have remained anonymous, were revealed and indicated, not a single name of any of the translators was mentioned. The preface only said that “the best Soviet poets have lovingly translated national folklore into the Russian language” (Gor'kii and Mekhlis 1937, 11). Although this anthology was not the only project dedicated to collecting and publishing the folklore of the Soviet peoples, it is particularly interesting for researchers due to the considerable number of documents extant in the archive of the editorial board of the volume located in the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art (RGALI). Recently, Natal’ia Kornienko published the first general overview of the editorial board’s work, where she analyzed some individual cases, in particular, that of the Soviet poet Demian Bednyi’s translations. Her article is accompanied by the first publication of documents from the archival holdings. As Kornienko explains, this is “a first preliminary history of the book” and “only some themes and documents” are introduced (Kornienko 2012, 861). Drawing upon Kornienko’s article, I intend to focus on the editorial board’s work regarding translations. The editorial board, which bore the name Dve Piatiletki (Two Fiveyear Plans), was set up by the newspaper Pravda on the initiative of Maksim Gorky and the Writers’ Union and was approved by a resolution of the Department of Agitation and Propaganda of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. The editorial board was led by the literary critic Georgii Korabel’nikov, who graduated from the Institute of Red Professors, a staunchly Marxist institution of higher education affiliated with the Communist Party. The stylistic refinement of translated texts was the task of Adelina Adalis (real name Adelina Efron), a reputed neoclassical poet since the 1920s and a pupil and intimate friend of Valerii Briusov. While traveling as a correspondent through Soviet Central Asia in the late 1920s—early 1930s she became one of the most productive translators from the different languages of the Soviet nationalities, such as Armenian, Azerbaijani, Tadzhik, Kazakh, and many others. The archive of the board contains documents reflecting its work over a twoyear period: correspondence, records of meetings, and research plans of those academic institutions collaborating with the editorial board. Most

Soviet Folklore 177 important for our purposes are the following types of documents: recordings of the originals, interlinear trots (podstrochniki), and the texts of the translations with editor’s corrections, both those included in the final version of the book and those that were left out.

Stalin’s Folklore and Translation Texts published in the Stalinist period as examples of “contemporary folklore” have recently drawn a great deal of research attention in respect to their authenticity and relationship to oral tradition. Researchers agree that these publications were not the result of neutral impartial material collection for academic purposes, and that the collectors seriously tampered with their content and form, earning these texts the designation of “pseudofolklore” (Miller 1990) and even “fakelor.” The main feature distinguishing such “folklore” texts dedicated to the new Soviet life was the collector’s active intervention in the texts’ production (Ivanova 2002). In fact, collectors were not collecting but ordering traditional performers to provide improvisations on specific topics, for instance a lamentation on the death of Lenin, or praise of the kolkhoz system. Once performed, recorded, and edited, texts of this kind never appeared in the oral tradition, and this fact obviously radically distinguishes them from traditional folklore (Arkhipova and Nekliudov 2010, 95–98). Of course, it was not only Russian folklore but also the oral tradition within the languages of the nationalities of the Soviet empire that was subjected to ideological manipulation and even fabrication. Here we are dealing with a sort of double “fabrication.” First, as a text of folklore, it cannot be deemed authentic due to the interference or coauthorship of the collector, with the total replacement of the traditional performer representing the most extreme case. Second, there was often a great distance between the translated text and the “original,” ranging from imprecise conveyance of the meaning given in the interlinear trot up to a total disregard for the original on the part of the final translator. Thus, producing translated “Stalinist folklore” turns out to be more complex than creating such a text in Russian because, in addition to the performer, it involves at least two more agents: the author of the interlinear trot and the translator.

The Principles of the Editorial Board’s Work Collecting folklore for the anthology was part of the agenda of the Museum of the Peoples of the USSR, whose staff was commissioned by the editorial board to carry out the collection of national folk art. In one of the documents produced by the editors and entitled “The sources of material on art works of the peoples of the USSR,” locations for collecting artifacts and “oral lore” were indicated alongside the names of

178  Elena Zemskova particular people and institutions.3 In many cases, folklore collectors were advised to request information from the various cultural and scientific organizations that had been established in almost every Soviet Republic during Soviet times. For example, in Belorussia, it would be the Institute of Literature of the Academy of Sciences of Belorussia, in Dagestan, the Institute of Dagestani Culture. The document also recommended that “additional collection of material” in all the Soviet republics be carried out. Another document was a set of detailed instructions for collectors, advising them on how to proceed with collecting folklore. This process did not presuppose a free, uncontrolled search. First of all, collectors had to visit local party authorities to be instructed as to which of the keepers of the oral folk tradition they should address in the first place. Collectors were expected not only to record texts but also to provide some basic information on the settlement where the recording was made, on its residents and its social structure, including an account of the ongoing establishment of new Soviet institutions (kolkhozes, clubs, educational institutions, etc.). As far as the content of the sources was concerned, there was a clear specification: “Out of all the texts, those reflecting class division, the history of the Revolution and Civil War, and Soviet life should be recorded first.”4 It was recommended that a performance be recorded with the aid of a phonograph and that it be committed scrupulously to paper. А letter compiled by the folklore section of the Writer’s Union provided some regulations concerning the collection of folklore material for translation into Russian.5 The letter was written in 1935 and seems to be one of the earliest examples of instructions of this kind. It offers an ideal scenario of how the author of the interlinear trot (podstrochnik)6—a word-by-word translation of the source text—should handle their assignment. In accordance with Stalin’s formula for folk art, that it be “socialist in form and national in content,” the authors of the instruction gave detailed recommendations on how to preserve the form in cases when the Russian-speaking poet-translator is not familiar with the source language. Thus, the responsibility for keeping “the national literary form” falls upon all those involved in creating the translated folkloric text, that is, upon the poet-translator, the author of the interlinear trot, and the field researcher, “who records the oral poetical text as it is performed by a bard or a taleteller.” In the opinion of the folklore section, the authors of the interlinear trots are not always aware of this responsibility, awkwardly trying to impart features of a polished literary text to their intermediate text: Interlinear trots are often written by people who have a perfect command of their native language—the source language—but whose expertise in the Russian language is not sufficient for conveying all

Soviet Folklore 179 the important and characteristic nuances of the source poem. But rather often the author of the interlinear trot, notwithstanding his good command of Russian, significantly distorts the source text, driven by the “false desire to embellish” his trot by adding to it alien images and subduing the translation to arbitrary rhythms, mostly borrowed from Russian poetry and having nothing in common with the rhythms of the source poem.7 The author of the interlinear trot is expected not only to provide a word-by-word translation of the source text but also to become a field researcher. Special emphasis is placed on these requirements. Tropes and set formulas in the source text should be preserved and provided with annotations regarding “their ethnographic character with respect to everyday life, language, and history.” Apart from that, it is suggested that some words from the source language, expressing features of everyday life or of history, should be kept in the trot and explicated in footnotes. It is recommended that repetitions in the source text should be retained if possible—if not, a note should be provided in the footnotes. Thereby an interlinear trot is charged with the important function of providing the poet-translator with information about the poetic form of the source text: its system of stanzas, rhyme, rhythm, etc. It is required that alliterations, internal rhymes, and other repetitions be indicated through annotation. In order to preserve these formal phonetic characteristics, it is recommended that the source text be included in the annotation: In all these cases, it may be very helpful for the poet if the source text is appended to the interlinear trot /in either Russian or Latin transcription/ where all the characteristic features of the composition and the phonetic structure should be emphasized /repetitions, rhymes, assonances, alliterations etc/. The source text should come together with thumbnail information about its rhythmical characteristics, and in the source text itself all the corresponding prosodies and vowel lengths should be marked in accordance with the principles of the rhythmical structure of the given language.8 The instructions dictated to the authors of the interlinear trots how to proceed and which clues concerning the source text to give to the poettranslator. However, the work of the poet-translator was never touched upon either in that letter or in any other documents written by the editorial board. Poetic translation, it seems, was considered to be “creative work” and so did not require any instructions. As far as one can judge by the archival documents, the authors of the interlinear trots followed this instruction. In the preparatory material for the volume there are some descriptions of the stanzaic system and the prosody of the source text. Such interlinear trots were made for

180  Elena Zemskova translations from Armenian and Georgian, from the languages of the peoples of Dagestan and the languages of the peoples of the North. But in many other cases, interlinear trots are not just lost but seem never to have existed. Even in collecting the texts from the aforementioned languages, newspaper publications of Russian translations were often used, and the editorial board did not seem to bother themselves with looking for the source texts. But even in those cases when the editorial board prepared a text for first publication, the respective interlinear trot can not always be found. For instance, only a few interlinear trots for texts in Ukrainian and Belorussian are preserved, which, however, can be explained by the fact that the poet-translators probably understood these languages fairly well. More revealing is the fact that not a single interlinear trot, let alone extracts from the source texts, can be found in the file with documents on Kazakhstan. This can be seen as yet another proof of the suggestion made by various scholars that the original transcriptions of the improvisations of Kazakh folk poets, if they at all existed, were generally not used to create the Russian translations. The editorial board, having only Russian-speaking members, did not require their field workers to provide the source texts; it was only recommended. As the editorial board did not seem to rank the original high in the sequence of stages involved in producing the final text, its role was only nominal. As for the interlinear trot, in editorial correspondence and the protocols of the meetings, it is often referred to as an indispensable stage in the creation of the translated work. However, the approach of the editorial board seems far from consistent. At times the absence of the source text and the interlinear crib served as an argument against publishing the text. One of the numerous examples of resolutions concerning the texts of the Buryat song “A tractor is cutting the ground,” prepared by the editor Naum Mor, says: “Musically weak piece Has no source text, no interlinear crib. Remove.”9 At the same time, the interlinear cribs of some of the texts published in the volume are absent in the archive of the editorial board, probably because they never existed. Obviously, the editorial board was well aware that they needed the interlinear crib to guarantee the authenticity of the final text. At the editorial meeting in April 1937, it came to light that interlinear cribs for some finished translations already selected for publication, were “in the process of being made,” which worried the editorial board, leading one board member, Korabel’nikov, to demand: We must have the history of every piece included in the layout of the book. We need to know why exactly that piece—not any other one—was selected. We need to have all the material concerning that piece sorted out in accordance with its national origin, and all the documents that were enclosed with it, with the source text, its passport [typically an index cart with information about the origins of

Soviet Folklore 181 the text—EZ] and so. If we do not have all these at our disposal, we will not be able to thoroughly check the authenticity of the material [. . .] we must ensure that all the incoming material is registered: the source text, the passport, the interlinear crib and all the translations with final editing.10

Decision Process There is no doubt that the final decision on which texts to include in the anthology was made not by the members of the editorial board but in the front office of Pravda. Submitting the selected texts to the higher authorities, the editors tried to enlist the support of all the institutions involved, the most significant being the local party authorities or the Writers’ Unions. For instance, a representative of the writers’ organization of Turkmenia, while pointing out that some of the well-known folkloric pieces were left out from the anthology as a result of problems with the field work carried out in the republic, nevertheless approved some texts and praised the quality of the translations: Out of all the material sent to the editorial board, the best pieces have been selected, some works have been carried out with the translators, as a result of which the translations managed to retain the form of Turkmen songs and to stay true to their content. The translations are close to the source texts.11 Furthermore, at different stages of the process the editorial board asked professionals to review the materials prepared. Reviewers were recruited from Soviet folklorists, on the one hand, and writers and poets, on the other. The reviews contain both praise and criticism. Consider the laudatory opinion of folklorist Mark Azadovskii, expressed in the manner of official commendations: Another important characteristic of this volume is the organization and the quality of translations. Until now, collections of folklore material of the peoples of the USSR have been appearing in academic editions and pursued strictly academic purposes; the quality of the editions intended as literary ones was for the most part rather poor: they were completely at odds with scientific requirements and often provided translations of quite low artistic quality. The anthology prepared by the “Two Five-Year Plans” resolutely breaks with the established tradition; it is built upon scientific knowledge and on a scrupulous selection and verification of the quality of translations, which provides a substantial degree of precision in conveying [the meaning of] the source text, and the careful selection of texts imparts an exceptional artistic significance to the edition.12

182  Elena Zemskova However, other reviewers had more critical words to say about both the selection and the stylistics of the translations. Thus V. Gusev (probably, the dramatist, scriptwriter and translator Viktor Mikhailovich Gusev) criticizes not only the infelicitous choice of words and expressions on the part of some translators but also the two key strategies of translation they employed—those of domestication and foreignization. He believes that “the abundance of untranslated words” “corrupts” many texts. On the other hand, in his opinion, some translations are “over-russified.” For instance, “the translation of the Mordvinian song ‘Dream’ is styled outright in Nekrasov’s or rather in Nikitin’s manner. The whole phonetic structure of the poem is typically Russian.”13 The most detailed critical review of the translations was provided by the noted folklorist Iurii Sokolov, who also pointed to the pronounced tendency to Russify the source texts: I’m convinced, and I think the editorial board of the “Two FiveYear Plans” will agree with me here, that a literary translation should not only accurately convey the subject, the plot, the ideology of the national work of art but, as far as it is possible, should also convey the peculiarities of the national artistic form. [. . .] We may claim quite confidently that the national form (with regard to the rhythm, rhyme, and phonetic structure) is not observed in a great number of translated songs. The translations that are not bad and at times even quite artistic, are in fact only Russian verses with their subject borrowed from national songs of different peoples of the USSR. Many “translations” of national poetry do not reproduce the idiosyncratic forms of popular art but either employ rhythms and compositions of Russian literary lyrics, or replace a specific national form by the form of the Russian folk song.14 Sokolov gives several examples where canonical Russian meters were utilized in the translations. Thus, he argues that the Armenian folk song “Tvoim boitsom ia stanu” [I’ll become your soldier] is rendered by the meter “familiar [to Russian readers] from the translation of Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage where iambic tetrameter and iambic trimeter are alternated and male rhymes are used. And the Lezgian song, which in the final version of the translation acquired the title “Maiak” [Lighthouse], is rendered with the stanzas of the famous poem A Bard in the Camp of Russian Warriors by Vasilii Zhukovskii. Sokolov remarks that the Mari song “Ia by s’ezdila v Moskvu” [To Moscow I would travel] is rendered, quite in accord with Gusev’s diagnosis, by the “verse of the Russian literary song of the kind written by Kol’tsov and Nekrasov.”15 In addition to his comments on the meter, Sokolov draws attention to literary expressions and topoi that are alien to folklore and yet employed in the translations.

Soviet Folklore 183 While Sokolov’s remarks concerning Russian folklore were partly taken into account by the editorial board, his criticism of the translations was left without comment. Absolutely all the texts considered by Sokolov in his review were included in the final version of the book without any corrections. The same is true for the Mordvinian song in which Gusev spotted traits of Nekrasov’s style. The editors, with Adelina Adalis first and foremost among them, sought to render poetic translations in a recognizable literary form. This form could be orientalized by retaining peculiar “national” lexical items and employing complex meters, such as derivatives of the hexameter. However, the more common practice was to use a Russified form and reduce the source poem to recognizable meters with set semantic connotations and familiar clichéd phrases. Thus, the Mari and Mordvinian folk songs from the anthology are very similar to Russian songs, and in their anapaestic dimeters, one can easily recognize the “Nekrasov” tradition. Generally, the most frequent meter of the translations that appeared in the volume was the trochaic tetrameter, a song meter that has remained the second most common in Russian poetry since 1830s (Gasparov 2012, 269).

Tatar and Armenian Songs Among other preparatory documents, the archive preserves some interlinear trots and versions of translations, which can be used to reconstruct a picture of the editorial work. Let us consider two indicative cases. The first case is a poem on Lenin’s death, which was not recorded specially for the anthology but was published in the newspaper Krasnyi Krym in January 1928: “The song was written down in 1927 in Bakhchisarai, the Crimea, by Vadim Vykhrov from the words of fifty-year old gardener Veli Odanbash (Crimean Tatar).”16 It is impossible to determine whether the text published in the newspaper was translated from any other source. The editorial board regarded it as a sort of interlinear trot of some absent original and commissioned a translation from the poet Arsenii Tarkovskii, which turned out to be a mere rearrangement of the “original.” Tarkovskii shapes the text into a work of accentual verse instead of vers libre as in the pretext and completes the stanzas by adding new attributes and changing realia so that they all have the same length. For instance, to add grandiloquence and to convey the sublimity of the moment, he turns simple “fishermen cockle boats” into “ships of the Black Sea.” However, the poem was published not in Tarkovskii’s translation but in a different version, supposedly provided by Adalis. Taking as a point of departure the picture of a storm at sea with petrels flying above, Adalis makes the poem conform to a text that was canonical for the Soviet reader, Maksim Gorky’s “prose poem” ““Pesnia o Burevestnike” [Song of the stormy petrel] (Gor'kii 1960) by employing unrhymed trochaic tetrameter (Gor'kii and Mekhlis 1937, 79).

184  Elena Zemskova Another example of Adalis’s editing strategy seems to be more indicative, since we are dealing with a text that was produced in complete accordance with the instructions issued by the editorial board for the writers of interlinear cribs. An Armenian song about a tractor was recorded in Armenian, which is clear from the transcription of the first five stanzas of the song in Cyrillic letters that was attached to the interlinear crib and contained instructions for the translator: The number of syllables—8. In stanza lines 3 stresses In the lines of refrain 4 stresses The meter is shaped after accentuated verse. There is an internal rhyme in the refrain, which is maintained throughout the poem.17 There are 18 stanzas in the interlinear crib, which seems to be quite close to the source text (at least, the first five stanzas). There are some explanations of the realia both inside the text and in the commentary to it. A note is added: “Recorded in 1934 from the words of the worker Nargiz Bayverdian, 30 years old, from Artik.”18 Some features of the interlinear crib enable us to say that it was performed “here and now” (on the spot), for the text contains references to particular people from the place where the text was recorded. For instance, the name of the tractor driver is given. The translation submitted by Vasilii Gatov, however, contains not 18 but only 9 stanzas. Instead of the accentuated verse with three stresses, indicated by the writer of the interlinear crib, Gatov opts for the trochaic tetrameter, the most common Russian song meter. Regarding lexical choices, his text is also far from an accurate rendering of the interlinear crib. At the same time, Gatov leaves untranslated the Armenian word dzhan [darling, dear], which both marks the text as a rendition and orientalizes it. Moreover, Gatov also keeps untranslated the word matah (as indicated in the commentary to the interlinear trots, “Matah literally means ‘prey.’ Let me fall prey”). This is the only trace of the tradition established by Valerii Briusov in his volume Poezia Armenii [Poery of Armenia] in 1916 (Gasparov 2001) of very accurate renditions of both meter and vocabulary in Russian translations of Armenian poetry. Editing Gatov’s translation, Adalis started with remarks in the margins and ended up rewriting the whole poem. In her version, which contains 11 stanzas, the gleeful mood of the poem is intensified by additional repetitions and exclamations whereas all the Armenian words disappear. It is remarkable here how far Adalis goes from Briusov’s mode of translation. His former pupil and ally, she is working now in a very different literary environment, addressing a completely new readership. As translated by Adalis, “The Song of a Tractor” teems with the very same literary patterns folklorist Sokolov urged translators to steer clear of. In the translation, the tractor is called milyi drug [dear friend], drug liubimyi, and drug bestsennyi [friend beloved, a precious friend], which

Soviet Folklore 185 are common set formulas in the Russian elegiac tradition. The tractor is addressed as “traktor nash prekrasnyi” [our beautiful tractor] that “vystupaet velichavo” [moves with majesty and grace]. (Compare this to: “Zdravstvui, kniaz’ ty moi prekrasnyi” [Greetings, my fair prince] and “a sama-to velichava, vystupaet budto pava” [and she herself appears full of majesty and grace] from Pushkin’s The Tale of Tsar Saltan). The line “Khlopnem, drugi, po stakanu!” [Let’s have a quick one, favorers!] strikes the reader as stylistically heterogeneous, with the low “Khlopnem po stakanu” coupled with the archaic and elevated drugi. In fact, it seems to be a rehash of the line: “Khlopnem, tetka, po stakanu!” [let’s have a quick one, biddy] from the poem of the famous Soviet writer Aleksandr Grin, which was included in his short story Ships in Liss (1922).

Conclusion All the preparatory material for the anthology Works of the Peoples of the USSR constitutes an important record of how exactly the “recording” of the empire’s voices was carried out in Stalin’s totalitarian society. The working process of the editorial board demonstrates all the tension within the Soviet project of translation from the languages of nationalities at a relatively early stage in its development. To manage this type of work the editorial board needed to elaborate and sometimes to invent new roles and instructions for the different agents involved, such as the podstrochnikist (producer of the interlinear trots) and poet-translator. Such editorial practices to some extent already adhered to the prescriptions given in the 1940 “Resolution on the regulation of translations from the languages of the peoples of the USSR” issued by the Bureau of National Comities of the Writer’s Union (published in Witt 2013b). The examined case seems also to present an example of how the Stalinists culture was functioning as a “culture of imitatio” with a very important role allotted to translation (Baer 2016, 119–123). An interesting and somewhat surprising characteristic of this project is that a counterfeit and an imitation were not considered by their creators as such. At the outset of the work on the volume, the editorial board had the lofty aspiration to establish a “scientific basis” for translations and to prove the authenticity of each and every text. To ensure this, field research was carried out, recordings were made and interlinear trots were created. However, ideological interference in the process of creating folkloric texts rendered all this work almost useless. The originals were often neglected, and the peculiarities of the national folklore were ignored for the sake of the spirit of the time and to support the “de-individualization of authorship” (Baer 2016, 124–131) that characterized Stalinist culture. Thereby the literary form was reduced to an “innominate recognizable” (Gronas 2001) set of clichés from the most simplified versions of the canon of Russian literature.

186  Elena Zemskova

Notes 1 This chapter was prepared within the framework of the Academic Fund Program at the National Research University Higher School of Economics (HSE) in 2015–2016 (grant № 15–01–0112) and supported within the framework of a subsidy granted to the HSE by the Government of the Russian Federation for the implementation of the Global Competitiveness Program. 2 Discussing the connection between the problematic identity of Russia as an “empire of nations” and the problem of translation, Brian James Baer underlines that whereas a nation understands itself as untranslatable “empires have enormous investment in the idea of translatability” (Baer 2016, 9). 3 RGALI. F.1521. Op.1. D.12. 4 RGALI. F.1521. Op.1. D.10. L.3. 5 RGALI. F. 1521. Op. 1. D.18. 6 For the role of interlinear trots (podstrochnik) in translations from national languages of the Soviet Union and the roles of different agents involved in such translation practices, see Witt 2013b. 7 RGALI. F. 1521. Op. 1. D.18. L.2. 8 RGALI. F. 1521. Op. 1. D. 18. L.4. 9 RGALI. F. 1521. Op. 3. D. 59. L.84. 10 RGALI 1521. F. Op. 3. D. 12. L.9. 11 RGALI. F. 1521. Op. 3. D. 9. L.112. 12 RGALI. F. 1521. Op. 3. D. 9. L.87–88. 13 RGALI. F. 1521. Op. 3. D. 9. L.117. 14 RGALI. F. 1521. Op. 3. D.9. L.69. 15 RGALI. F. 1521. Op. 3. D. 9. L.70. 16 RGALI. F. 1521. Op. 3. D. 77. L.13. 17 RGALI. F. 1521. Op. 3. D. 71. L.43. 18 RGALI. F. 1521. Op. 3. D. 71. L.38.

References Archival material RGALI (Russian State Archive for Literature and Art) F. 1521 (Editorial board of the anthology Tvorchestvo narodov SSSR [Works of the Peoples of the USSR]).

Print sources Arkhipova, Aleksandra and Sergei Nekliudov. 2010. “Fol’klor i vlast’ v zakrytom obshchestve” [Folklore and power in a closed society]. Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 101: 84–108. Baer, Brian James. 2016. Translation and the Making of Modern Russian Literature. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Bogdanov, Konstantin, Rikkardo Nikolozi and Iurii Murashov (eds.). (2013). Dzhambul Dzhabaev: prikliucheniia kazakhskogo akyna v sovetskoi strane [Dzhambul Dzhabaev: Adventures of a Kazakh akyn in the Soviet land]. Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie. Dobrenko, Evgeny. 2011. “Naideno v perevode: rozhdenie sovetskoi mnogonat­ sional’noi literatury iz smerti avtora” [Found in translation: The birth of the multinational Soviet literature from the death of the author]. Neprikosnovennyi zapas 78 (4): 236–262.

Soviet Folklore 187 Even-Zohar, Itamar. 1990. “The Position of Translated Literature within the Literary Polysystem.” Poetics Today 11 (1): 45–51. Gasparov, Mikhail. 2001. “Podstrochnik i mera tochnosti” [Interlinear trots and the measure of accuracy]. In O russkoi poezii. Analizy, Interpretatsii, Kharakteristiki [On Russian poetry. Analysis, interpretations, characteristics], 361– 372. Moscow: Azbuka. Gasparov, Mikhail. 2012. Metr i smysl [Meter and meaning]. Moscow: Fortuna EL. Gor’kii Maksim. 1960. “Pesnia o Burevestnike” [Song of the stormy petrel]. In Gor’kii, Maksim. Sobranie sochinenii v 18 tomakh [Collected Works in 18 Volumes] I, 461. Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo khudozhestvennoi literatury. Gor’kii, Maksim and Lev Mekhlis (eds.). 1937. Tvorchestvo narodov SSSR : XX let Velikoi Oktiabr’skoi sotsialisticheskoi revoliutsii v SSSR: 1917–1937. [Works of the peoples of the USSR: Twenty years of the Great October Socialist Revolution in the USSR: 1917–193]. Moscow: Pravda. Gronas, Mikhail. 2001. “Bezymiannoe uznavaemoe, ili kanon pod mikroskopom” [Innominate recognizable or a canon under a microscope]. Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 51 (5): 68–86. Ivanova, Tatiana. 2002. “O folk’lornoi i psevdofol’klornoi prirode sovetskogo eposa” [On folklore and pseudo-folkloric nature of the Soviet epic]. In Rukopisi, kotorykh ne bylo: Poddelki v oblasti slavianskogo fol’klora [Manuscripts that did not exist: Falsifications in Slavic folklore], edited by A. Toporkov et al., 403–431. Moscow: Ladomir. Ivanova, Tatiana. “O fol'klornoi i psevdofol'klornoi prirode sovetskogo eposa” [On folklore and pseudo-folkloric nature of the Soviet epic]. In Rukopisi, kotoryh ne bylo: Poddelki v oblasti slavanskogo fol'klora, edited by A. Toporkov, 403–431. Moscow: Ladomir. Kornienko, Natal’ia. 2012. “Gosudarstvennyi literaturnyi proekt ‘Tvorchestvo narodov SSSR’ ” [The state literary project “Works of the peoles of the USSR”]. In Tekstologicheskii vremennik: Russkaia literatura XX veka: Voprosy tekstologii i istochnikovedeniia: 2, edited by Natal’ia Kornienko, 855–916. Moscow: IMLI RAN. Martin, Terry Dean. 2001. The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923–1939. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Miller, Frank. 1990. Folklore for Stalin: Russian Folklore and Pseudofolklore of the Stalin Era. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe. Witt, Susanna. 2013a. “Arts of Accommodation: The First All-Union Conference of Translators, Moscow, 1936, and the Ideologization of Norms.” In The Art of Accommodation: Literary Translation in Russia, edited by Leon Burnett and Emily Lygo, 141–184. Oxford: Peter Lang. Witt, Susanna. 2013b. “The Shorthand of Empire: ‘Podstrochnik’ Practices and the Making of Soviet Literature.” Ab Imperio 3: 155–190.

12 Western Monsters—Soviet Pets? Translation and Transculturalism in Soviet Children’s Literature Valerii Viugin

My concern with a specific discourse from the history of Soviet art for children, on which this contribution focuses, has been stimulated by a broader interest in anthropophagy, or cannibalism, as a topos and in cannibalistic discourses in twentieth-century Russian culture as a whole. On the one hand, my chapter can be considered as a kind of extended commentary on a line from Samuil Marshak’s later poem Robin-Bobin (1955), which was, in fact, a translation of a rhyme from the famous Mother Goose collection. Marshak’s main character, like the character from the original nursery rhyme, is a sort of anthropophagus, or cannibal. On the other hand, I also examine here a specific quality of children’s literature and cinema that manifests itself in peculiar representations of evil, cruelty, and violence and, as a result, in unique appropriations of the emotion of fear. This opens up discussion of certain rhetorical aspects of the Soviet politics of horror from a transcultural perspective. The fact that, in spite of Russia’s strong isolationist bias, a vast amount of literature was translated in the USSR allows for interesting comparisons concerning evil and violence to be done on children’s literature in the source and target cultures. To introduce such an exotic subject as cannibalism is justifiable if we consider the latter to be the full and final embodiment of indubitably terrifying evil. In order to provide a context for the practices of translation and retelling that I will scrutinize here, it may be helpful at first to draw on the experience of Russian literature of the famine—specifically on that part that concentrates on children but was certainly not designed for them. The famine following the Bolshevik Revolution provoked a wave of both non-fiction and fictional literature in which cannibalism was the central theme. Among documentary sources, Lev Vasilevskii’s book Zhutkaia letopis’ goloda (samoubiistva i antropofagiia) [A horrible chronicle of the famine: suicides and anthropophagy] (Vasilevskii 1922) and David Frank’s anthropological study Liudoedstvo [Anthropophagy] (Frank 1926) deserve special mention. Vasilevskii accurately reported the humanitarian catastrophe in the Ural region while Frank carefully investigated the

Western Monsters 189 disaster in Ukraine in the early 1920s. In addition to currently observed cannibalistic practices, such as murders, necrophagy, and the sale and preservation of human flesh, Frank paid a good deal of attention to the history, ethnography, and psychology of anthropophagy in general. Perhaps it is worth recalling here Mikhail Gernet’s socio-criminological study “Golod i prestupnost’ ” [The famine and crime] (Gernet 1927) based on Vasilevskii’s survey and on the collection of essays O golode [On the famine] edited by Konstantin Georgievskii and Viktor Kogan (Georgievskii and Kogan 1922), among others. Authors of fictional literature and poetry, too, responded to this tragedy. For example, in 1922 Russian Futurist poet Aleksei Kruchenykh published a book entitled Golodniak [The famine] in which he narrated how a mother fed her starving children young meat: Uboinki molodoi poesh’te,/Tol’ko kroshku vsiu glotaite do kontsa, [. . .] // Mat’ skazala i tikho vyshla. . . /Deti glotali s golodukhi,/ Da vidiat v kotle plavaiut chelovech’i ruki,/A v uglu vorochaiutsia porvannye kishonki. // U-okh!. zavopili, da oravoi v dver’/I eshche pushche akhnuli:/Tam mamen’ka visela—/ Sheia posinevshaia/ Obmotanna namylennoi paklei! (Kruchenykh 1922, n.p.) [“Would you like some ‘fresh meat’ to eat?/Then just swallow down every bite” [. . .] /The mother said and left them./The starving kids began to swallow,/But suddenly they saw human hands, floating in the soup pot,/And ripped-out guts writhing in the corner. // “Aaagh!” They screamed and rushed out the door/And shouted again./They saw the hanged mother/With the noose around her neck.] In that same year Sergei Sergeev-Tsenskii wrote a story entitled V grozu [In the storm] (Sergeev-Tsenskii 1929), which began with an episode about a Tatar man killing his younger children with a knife, one after another, like sheep. He fed them to his wife, and he ate them, too. The next year Maksimilian Voloshin in his poem “Golod” [The famine] wrote, “I materi, zarezavshi detei,/Zasalivali vprok. ‘Sama rodila/ Sama i s’em’ ” [Mothers after slaughtering their children pickled them for future use. “I gave birth to them,” they said, “so I will eat them as well”] (Voloshin 2003, I, 346). At the end of the 1920s Nikolai Kliuev read his unpublished poem “Pogorel’shchina” [Charred remains] to his friends and colleagues, in which the following lines occur: “I sineglazogo Vasiatku/Napredki posolili v kadku” [And the blue-eyed boy Vasiatka was salted in advance in a tub] (Kliuev 1954, II, 133). Texts depicting the horror of the Revolution and Civil War were more or less typical for the 1920s, yet, as we know, there was an increasingly powerful tendency to mask any negative effects of Bolshevik policies.

190  Valerii Viugin This latter strategy had become dominant by the 1930s. Nevertheless, against the background of numerous taboos, both explicit and implicit, cannibals found their niche in Russian literature for children and young adults. First, various works of adventure fiction and travelogues successfully competed with texts about indigenous Russian anthropophagi. The genre of adventure fiction was not a new one in Russian literature. It had survived the Revolution and was slowly adapting itself to Soviet life. Consider the following examples of this type of literature that circulated in Russia at this time: translations of Joachim Brenner’s chronicle Besuch bei den Kannibalen Sumatras [A visit to the Sumatran cannibals] (Brenner 1894, 1924) and Merlin Taylor’s Where Cannibals Roam (Taylor 1924, 1927), as well as Liudmila Opochinina’s original book Puteshestviia Kuka v stranu liudoedov [Voyages of captain Cook to the land of cannibals] (Opochinina 1929) and Nikolai Chukovskii’s stories Kapitan Dzheims Kuk [Captain James Cook] (Chukovskii 1927) and Odin sredi liudoedov [Alone among cannibals] (Chukovskii 1930). Cannibals also appeared, of course, in translations of Jules Verne’s popular novels and in adaptations/translations of Daniel Defoe’s The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. Second, man-eaters were re-settled in children’s literature as fairy-tale characters. Already in 1918 Kornei Chukovskii, who was to become an eminent author of Soviet children’s literature, published a fairy tale entitled Dzhek—pobeditel’ velikanov [Jack the giant-killer], in which a little boy defeats a cruel anthropophagus, Kormoran, who consumed cowardly local people. A man-eater also played a role in Chukovskii’s “old English legend,” as he characterized it, Krasnozubyi Ain [Red-toothed Ain] (1917), and in his very popular stories about Doctor Aibolit (the Russian version of Dr. Dolittle); the anthropophagus in those stories became known as Barmalei: “Bar-ma-lei!/On begaet po Afrike/I kushaet detei . . .” [Bar-ma-lei!/He runs up and down Africa/and consumes children] (Chukovskii 2012a, 51). Maksim Gorky also highlighted anthropophagi in his works. In 1936, writing sardonically about contemporary parents, he states: “Vsiudu papy ili mamy/Neposlushny i upriamy./Khodiat babushki i dedy/I rychat, kak liudoedy” [Fathers and mothers are everywhere./ They are disobedient and stubborn. Grandmothers and grandfathers walk around growling like cannibals] (Gor’kii1974, XX, 499). Soviet cinema also addressed the theme. In 1938, for instance, the sisters Zinaida and Valentina Brumberg supplied the Soviet audience with an animated screen adaptation of Charles Perrault’s Puss in Boots [Kot v sapogakh] (Brumberg and Brumberg 1938), in which a wicked magician was represented as a cannibal. In 1941 filmmakers Leonid Amal’rik and Vladimir Polkovnikov produced an animated cartoon about Chukovskii’s cannibal-pirate Barmalei (Amal’rik and Polkovnikov 1941). One particular cannibal character who appeared in the sphere of naive

Western Monsters 191 anthropophagy just before the war and remained a favorite of the general public until the end of the USSR came from cinema. This was the character of Baba Iaga played by Georgii Milliar (Rou 1939, 1964). This fascinating Russian witch, while constantly switching between her roles as a magic helper and an evil man-eater, time and again fails to roast a positive hero/heroine, instead taking his or her place in the oven as the victim herself. Curiously enough, Soviet children’s literature needed cannibals, although toothless ones. They appeared even there where they had not been before. Thus, Aleksandr Volkov added a chapter “Elli v plenu u liudoeda” [Ellie, the ogre’s captive] to his widely known (in Soviet Russia) version of Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which, in contrast to the original, featured a cannibal. (Volkov’s book was titled The Wizard of the Emerald City [Volshebnik izumrudnogo goroda] (Volkov 1939, 24–30; see: Inggs 2011)). It is interesting to observe that by contrast with the aforementioned pirate-anthropophagus Barmalei, neither Hugh Lofting’s original pirates nor his “King of the Jolliginki” intended to eat Dr. Dolittle. Instead, Lofting’s King promises: “This White Man shall scrub my kitchen-floor for the rest of his life!” (Lofting 1930, 93). It is doubtful whether it makes sense to insist, without reservation, that the officially sanctioned man-eaters in children’s fiction served as direct compensation for the prohibition of literature on the famine, although there is evidence to support this claim. This particular discourse on cannibalism was influenced, if one can put it this way, by the aesthetic politics of evil that came to occupy a prominent position in public discourse by the 1930s. This trend is exemplified by the fate of Vladimir Zazubrin’s writing. By 1923, when his best-known story “Shchepka” [The chip] was written, he was already known as the author of the novel Dva mira [Two worlds], a Russian Civil War narrative focused on robberies, executions, and sexual violence. Two Worlds was merciless toward its readers. “The Chip”1 was even bloodier. This simultaneously allegorical and neardocumentary horror story about executioners from the Cheka (All-Russian Extraordinary Commission, or the secret police) did not pass Soviet censorship and was published only in 1989 (Zazubrin 1989). Its author, in spite of his devotion to the Revolution, was imprisoned and executed in 1937. It is clear what kind of “truth of life” official Soviet culture had rejected together with Zazubrin’s species of realism: the many detailed scenes of violence in Zazubrin’s work were an irritation within the comfortable state narrative. Finding works in Soviet literature and cinema with so many gruesome depictions is no easy task; excessive violence was not favored—be it revolutionary or counter-revolutionary. At the same time, it seems natural that neither mysticism nor aesthetics in the spirit of H. P. Lovecraft were incorporated into officially sanctioned art, although the Soviet audience felt as great a need for them as any other

192  Valerii Viugin public of the time. Neither in literature nor in cinema, except for the screen adaptation of Nikolai Gogol’s Vii [Vii: An evil s pirit] (Kropachev and Ershov 1967) and in a tiny number of foreign films, was there any place for horror, which was so important in Western popular culture. Soviet writers attempted various strategies for legitimately describing or referring to evil. Only a few of them became successful and “canonical,” and once again, not without difficulties. In its treatment of evil and violence, Soviet children’s literature and cinema shared the fate of art for adults. Samuil Marshak was one of those Soviet writers who suggested a successful literary strategy (success here implied not only recognition and greater personal prosperity but, at its most basic level, survival under Stalin). A well-known example from debates over the relationship between children and man-eaters can be used to demonstrate how this aesthetic mechanism of transforming evil, which involves both authors and their critics, worked. It is hard to overlook the fact that the evil in Soviet fairy tales is usually not omnipotent; sometimes it is even weak and charming. Referring to Marshak’s translations of English children’s poetry, Efim Etkind discussed the specific techniques used by the translator, commenting: Variant S. Marshaka dobrodushnyi—u nego Robin-Bobin proglotil mnogo vsiakoi zhivnosti, da eshche i piat’ tserkvei s kolokol’niami, no ved’ on ne liudoed: tol’ko kak-to (vidimo, sluchaino) on slopal vmeste s prilavkom miasnika. Marshak namerenno ignoriroval posledniuiu stroku originala, gde Robin-Bobin stanovitsia chudishchem: “He ate the priest and all the people.” (Etkind 1963, 372; italics added) [Samuil Marshak’s version [of the evil character] is good-natured. His Robin-Bobin swallowed up all sorts of living things, and even five churches with their bell-towers, but all the same he is no maneater. It is as if he gobbled up the butcher and his counter only by accident. Marshak intentionally ignored the last line of the original text where Robin-Bobin turned into a monster, that is: “He ate the priest and all the people”] Certain aspects of this interpretation are especially interesting. There are several versions of the rhyme from the Mother Goose collection, the translation of which Marshak published in 1955. Here is the one Etkind was referring to: Robin the Bobbin, the big-bellied Ben, He ate more meat than fourscore men; He ate a cow, he ate a calf.

Western Monsters 193 He ate a butcher and a half. He ate a church, he ate a steeple. He ate the priest and all the people! (Baring-Gould 1962, 34) The horrifying final line is absent from Marshak’s poem: Robin-Bobin Robin-Bobin Koe-kak Podkrepilsia Natoshchak: S’el telenka utrom rano, Dvukh ovechek i barana, S’el korovu tselikom I prilavok s miasnikom, Sotniu zhavoronkov v teste I konia s telegoi vmeste, Piat’ tserkvei i kolokolen,— Da eshche i nedovolen! (Marshak 1968, II, 127) [Robin-Bobin had a snack. Early in the morning he ate a calf, two sheep and а ram, a whole cow, a butcher together with his counter, a hundred larks cooked in dough, and a horse together with the cart, five churches with their belfries, but still he isn’t full!] But there is another extended English version that ends with an additional stanza: A cow and a calf, An ox and a half, A church and a steeple, And all the good people, And yet he complained that his stomach wasn’t full. (Lang 1897, 66) The last line of this stanza definitely corresponds to Marshak’s version, suggesting that Marshak omitted even more potentially terrifying lines than Etkind had supposed, reinforcing the latter’s point. There are three things that concern Marshak’s translation and and Etkind’s comment on it that I would like to stress.

194  Valerii Viugin First, in spite of all the nuances, it is difficult to judge how much bloodthirstier the original text is than the translation: the ironic nature of nursery rhymes practically disavows this kind of comparison. If the original is humorous and if, because of that, the effect of violence is already weakened by the very genre itself, why should the translation not share in this mildness? It is more significant that Marshak chose to translate a goodnatured parody rather than true horror fiction. Second, as a professional reader, Etkind, whose point of view seems to be typical of Soviet literary criticism, whether intentionally or not, provides us with a specific pattern of perception of the poem. In order to understand how, in the aesthetic sense, a text addressed to a mass audience works, one should take into account both the author’s intention and the regulatory modes of reading, suggested and imposed by experts upon the general public. Third, in the context of Etkind’s laudatory article, Robin’s good nature looks like a remarkable achievement of the Soviet school of translation (see the chapters by Borisenko and Khotimsky in this volume). And Etkind was right again, although the word “achievement” can be easily replaced by the non-judgmental term “specificity.” Let us remember another popular translation of Robin the Bobbin, the Big-Bellied Ben into Russian made by Kornei Chukovskii in 1929, long before Marshak published his version. Here Chukovskii depicted a fairly savage creature. He translated the line “He ate more meat than fourscore men” as “. . . ate forty men”: Barabek Robin-Bobin Barabek Skushal sorok chelovek, I korovu, i byka, I krivogo miasnika, I telegu, i dugu, I metlu, i kochergu, Skushal tserkov’, skushal dom, I kuznitsu s kuznetsom, A potom i govorit: “U menia zhivot bolit!” (Chukovskii 2012b, I, 171) [Robin the Bobbin Barabek ate forty men, and a cow, and a bull, and a butcher blind in one eye, and a cart, and a shaft bow, and a broom, and a poker; he ate a church, and a house, a smithy together with the blacksmith; And then he said: “I have a stomachache”]. Of course, this appalling violence fails to make any sense, because all that is at stake here is a skit: near-nonsense verse, meant to amuse.

Western Monsters 195 And yet, in spite of everything, the tendency to dilute evil and to make unnecessary excuses for those authors daring to touch upon such a delicate topic is glaring. In post-revolutionary literature, writers, publishers, critics, and illustrators also supported the depiction of evil as entertaining. Thus, commenting on Nikolai Radlov’s artwork, writer Konstantin Fedin remarked: “Liudoed tochit nozh. [. . .] A kakoe tochilo? Posmotrite etot mekhanizm—on vnushaet smekh. Ot etogo liudoed [. . .] stanovitsia dobrym liudoedom iz priiatnoi skazki” [The man-eater is whetting his knife [. . .]. But have a look at his grindstone! This machinery makes us laugh. As a result, the scary man-eater [. . .] has turned into a kind man-eater from a sweet fairy tale]. (Ioffe 1971, 148). Fedin was discussing here an illustration to Volkov’s translation/version of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, mentioned earlier. In the end, all these efforts come to resemble depersonalized attempts to suppress the emotional impact on the audience of risky but unavoidable subjects, such as violence, cruelty, and death. The aspiration on the part of prominent children’s writers to find “safe” strategies for representing evil can be explained in terms of their struggle against so-called pedagogues (including Lenin’s wife Nadezhda Krupskaia) who, in the 1920s and 1930s, sought to radically purify literature. The key point, however, is that the rhetoric of evil with which I am concerned predominated in Soviet art. This rhetoric of evil differs, for example, from the heretical formalist approach. Viktor Shklovskii stated that, “po sushchestvu svoemu iskusstvo vneemotsional’no. [. . .] Liudoed otrezaet golovu u svoikh docherei, i deti ne pozvoliaiut pri rasskaze propuskat’ etu detal’. Eto ne zhestoko—eto skazochno” [art is essentially unemotional. [. . .] A man-eater cuts off his daughters’ heads, and children do not allow the storyteller to omit this detail. This is not cruelty—it’s what makes up the tale] (Shklovskii 1929, 192). In this respect, Shkovskii’s views aligned with the marginalized aesthetics of Marina Tsvetaeva. Tsvetaeva wrote, “Ia, kak vsiakii rebenok, k zverstvam—privykla. Razve deti nenavidiat Liudoeda za to, chto khotel otsech’ mal’chikam golovy? [. . .] Vse eto—chistaia stikhiia strakha, bez kotoroi skazka ne skazka i uslada ne uslada” [Like any child, I was accustomed to atrocities. Do children in fact hate the man-eater who wanted to chop off the heads of the little boys? [. . .] All this stuff is the pure element of fear without which a tale is not a tale, and pleasure is not pleasure] (Tsvetaeva 1994, V, 501). Conversely, established Soviet writers, filmmakers and artists sought to avoid unemotional cruelty and the pure element of fear that Shklovskii and Tsvetaeva mention as the very essence of art. Evil, of necessity, had its place in Soviet popular art, but, invariably, it was reduced and moderated by specific forms of rhetoric, stylistic devices, or genres. As far as we can judge by Marshak’s and Chukovskii’s translations, Soviet children’s poetry demonstrated barely perceptible, although certainly no

196  Valerii Viugin less effective, shifts in the representation of the idea of violence while it was being transplanted into Soviet soil. But Soviet literature also knew much more radical techniques for modifying originals. Much has already been written about what may be the most indicative literary work with respect to the politics of evil, but it is one that cannot be ignored here. While only a select few among Soviet readers were familiar with The Adventures of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi, the full translation of which was published in the USSR only in 1959, Aleksei Tolstoi’s adaptation of Collodi’s Pinocchio, titled Zolotoi kliuchik, ili Prikliucheniia Buratino [The golden key, or the adventures of Buratino] (Tolstoi 1936), became famous as soon as it appeared in 1936. In contrast to Tolstoi’s tale, there is an abundance of routine violence and everyday cruelty in Collodi’s narrative. As soon as he comes into the world, Pinocchio kills the defenseless Talking Cricket, which would appear later as a ghost. After that, he burns up his own legs. Next Pinocchio is caught in a trap and is chained up like a dog. Then he turns into a donkey, and his owner, who used to punish donkeys by biting off their ears, throws him into the sea where he is devoured piecemeal by a shoal of fishes. A classmate of Pinocchio is badly injured in the fight, etc. In other words, Collodi wrote a pretty violent text. Although Buratino, the Russian version of Pinocchio, does endure some hardship, there is almost nothing similar to Collodi’s version. The original’s scenes of brutality were modified or omitted from this iconic Stalin-era classic to conform to the Soviet literary ethos in the development of which Tolstoi himself participated. By the way, in the introduction to the first complete Russian translation of Pinocchio, the translator Emmanuil Kazakevich states: “ ‘Prikliucheniia Pinokkio’—kniga, polnaia obaianiia, optimizma i neobyknovenno nezhnoi liubvi k trudiashchemusia cheloveku” [The Adventures of Pinocchio is a book full of charm, optimism and unusually tender affection for working people]” (Kollodi 1959, 4). Kazakevich’s declaration once again stresses the regulatory role played by Soviet critics in “domesticating” cruelty and evil. It is important that representations of evil were also controlled through the protective reception of critics, who offered to the reader an appropriate interpretation of a narrative. In addition to the arguments of Etkind, Fedin, and Kazakevich that have been cited earlier, many other examples could be presented, a worthy subject for a separate study. By contrast with the aforementioned cases, the dramatic history of one of Kornei Chukovskii’s poems about the pirate Barmalei, written in 1942–1943, is an excellent example of a failed attempt to enlist evil in the service of Soviet literature. It would seem that Chukovskii’s war tale in verse “Odoleem Barmaleia” [Let’s conquer Barmalei] (Chukovskii 2012c, 454) appeared at an opportune moment for this type of literature. Very briefly sketched, the plot runs as follows: Chukovskii depicts

Western Monsters 197 a war between animals—the inhabitants of the land Aibolitia [Dr. Dolittle’s land] and those of Svirepia [The land of fierce beings], led by the pirate Barmalei. A boy called Vania Vasil’chikov from the land Chudoslavia [The wonderfully famous land] also takes part in the fighting. Vania assists the good animals in defeating their enemies. This anti-fascist (as Chukovskii stated) text was published in a newspaper for Soviet Pioneers. Young readers and even a few critics were initially pleased with it, so it was surprising that it was suddenly banned by the censors when it was later proposed for an anthology of Soviet children’s poetry. The author, by his own testimony, was unable to comprehend this official castigation. It turns out, Stalin, who actually played the role of the main censor of this book, personally struck it from the list (Chukovskii 2013, I, 589). This action was followed by a targeted press campaign, which makes additionally clear who the main reader and critic in Chudoslavia (i.e., in the USSR) was and whose taste Soviet cultural workers had to take into account first and foremost. Chukovskii always struggled to publish his tales, but after Stalin’s death, he gained recognition as a prominent and loyal writer. The case of “Let’s Conquer Barmalei” was different. This story remained taboo until the collapse of the USSR. In order to understand the reasons behind the failure or success of a work of art, it is often not enough to understand the complaints and protests openly expressed by critics. One can explain many things by reference to the competition between rival institutions. Nevertheless, there is always a place for another and more abstract kind of logic, never openly admitted by writers’ contemporaries. The history of Chukovskii’s tale certainly requires consideration in terms of the Soviet rhetoric of evil, which imposed a strict quota on evil regardless of whether it was committed by an enemy or a friend of the regime. In the final scene of “Let’s Conquer Barmalei,” the author describes how, after a long and bloody combat, the winners shoot their captives and then celebrate. In pre-revolutionary children’s literature, evil and goodness were represented in a variety of ways: sometimes depicted in highly sentimental terms, as in Sirotka [The little orphan] by Karl Peterson (“Shel po ulitse maliutka:/Posinel i ves’ drozhal” [A little boy was walking along the street, he had turned blue and was trembling with cold] (Peterson 1843, 229)), in which God was asked to alleviate the child’s pain. In addition to this kind of story, one can find a very different type of cruel literature, such as the poem Stepka-Rastrepka (a Russian version of Heinrich Hoffmann’s Der Struwwelpeter), which provided, instead of help, a warning about what could happen to a boy who refused to trim his nails: his fingers were cut off. After 1917, or, more precisely, by the 1930s, the situation had changed. Marshak, supported by Maksim Gorky, fiercely attacked both Lidia Charskaia’s famous pre-revolutionary sentimental writing and Russian

198  Valerii Viugin versions of Der Struwwelpeter, although Marshak’s attitude toward the latter was less hostile than it was toward the former. He obviously preferred the writings of Wilhelm Busch and Heinrich Hoffmann to weepy poetry for children, writing: Avtor “Stepki-rastrepki” i ego russkii perevodchik luchshe znali detei, chem khrestomatiinyi Pleshcheev. Ne znaiu, udalos’ li Pleshcheevu razzhalobit’ svoimi stikhami o bedniake i ptichke khot’ odnogo rebenka, no ia sovershenno uveren v tom, chto avtor i perevodchik “Stepki-rastrepki” dobilis’ svoei tseli—raspoteshili pokupatelia vovsiu. (Marshak 1971, VII, 295) [The author of Stepka-Rastrepka and his Russian translator knew children better than did the popular poet Pleshcheev. I do not know whether Pleshcheev with his poems about a poor man or a bird managed to move even one child to pity, but I am completely sure that the author and translator of Stepka-Rastrepka achieved their aim—they thoroughly amused the customers buying their books.] At the same time, Marshak stayed away from the difficult issues of cruelty and violence, which is so characteristic of that sort of literature. As a founder of a new normative aesthetics, he concentrated only on “energetic rhythm” [boikost’ ritma], “lively intonation” [zhivaia intonatsiia] and—an “appropriate plot” [podkhodiashchii siuzhet], for which Busch and Hoffmann were famous (Marshak 1971, VII, 295). Why he needed such euphemisms is evident from the perspective of his debates with pedagogues; it is likely that most successful children’s fiction by Soviet writers emerged from compromises with the latter. Marshak observed: Esli poslushat’ pedagoga-pedanta, nel’zia pechatat’ ni odnoi narodnoi skazki. V kazhdoi on zametit odnu edinstvennuiu chertu—i vsegda porochnuiu. To skazka dlia nego slishkom zhestokaia, to slishkom dobrodushnaia, to slishkom pechal’naia, to slishkom veselaia. (Marshak 1933, 2; italics added) [If we were to take into account the pedagogue-pedant’s opinion, then not a single folk tale would be published. In each of them, he sees just one feature, which is without exception a shameful one. For him, a tale is either too brutal, or too good-natured, or too sorrowful, or too cheerful.] To a large degree, this struggle against such excessive emotions (against showing too [slishkom] much of any quality) determined the future of Soviet literature, cinema and art, in general. Limits set on ferocity and

Western Monsters 199 fear, as well as on tenderness and compassion, were strictly controlled within the Soviet canon. Marshak’s point of view indicated a more widespread trend. However, each strategy was nuanced. With regard to the Soviet melodramatic genre, Arkadii Gaidar’s famous story about two boys “Chuk i Gek” or, for instance, stories dealing with Lenin’s relations with children (“Na elke v shkole” [New year’s party in the school] by Vladimir BonchBruevich) can be viewed as a sort of Christmas tale. But in any case, this was emotionally different literature. Among those narratives focusing on more dramatic forms of evil or more intense fear is the TV adaptation of the stage play The Star Boy directed by Anatolii Dudorov and Evgenii Zil’bershtein (Dudorov and Zil’bershtein 1957) and based on Oscar Wilde’s short story of the same title, or Aleksandr Ptushko’s screen adaptation of Evgenii Shvarts’s Skazka o poteriannom vremeni [A tale of lost time] (Ptushko 1964). One of the most celebrated filmmakers, Aleksandr Rou, sometimes included fear-provoking scenes in his films. In literature, Andrei Platonov, for example, dared to recount the tale of a young mother whose hands were cut off by her husband (Platonov 2012, VI, 276–287). At the same time, the tales of the Brothers Grimm and the folk tales collected by Aleksandr Afanas’ev, which were available in the USSR, far from being innocuous, upset the general harmony. Yet, in general, Soviet art followed the aesthetic politics that emerged with the help of Gorky and Marshak in the 1930s. It is an open secret that, in the twentieth century, control over ways of representing evil, violence and fear in art for children intensified not only in Russia but also everywhere in Europe and the United States. The Soviet authors I have mentioned borrowed their plots from the literature of a previous age, founded on different and mostly outdated ethical premises, while transforming these dated texts into their own narratives. It should not surprise us that they omitted motifs that appeared to be dangerous from the perspective of modern views on children’s reading. The Soviet project for the taming of evil, however, had its own specific rules. In this respect, as in many others, Soviet censorship and self-censorship were, unsurprisingly, more drastic than in Europe and in the United States. This can be seen by looking at the transformation of the “cautionary tale” as a genre, which includes the aforementioned Struwwelpeter or even Jane Taylor’s Original Poems for Infant Minds (1804–1805), which offers an equally extreme approach to moral education. In English-language literature of the mid-twentieth century, Roald Dahl became the most popular writer in the cautionary tale tradition. His book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Dahl 1964), despite provoking scandal, enjoyed considerable success, which was only reaffirmed by Mel Stuart’s screen adaptation (Stuart 1971). Dahl’s book, however, gained recognition in Russia only in recent years due to Tim Burton’s new screen

200  Valerii Viugin adaptation (Burton 2005). Soviet children’s authors distanced themselves from this pedagogical aesthetics beginning in the 1930s. In order to understand the very different reception of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, perhaps it is not enough to recall the character who gets shrunk to the size of a mouse and then stretched with a special machine for testing the stretchiness of chewing gum; or the one who is turned into a blueberry and then squeezed. These examples are too unreal; in Tsvetaeva’s terms, they come from the fairy-tale genre. But the boys drowning in chocolate before their helpless parents’ eyes, the girls sent down the rubbish chute to be fried like sausages in a furnace—punishments like these definitely could not be accommodated within the ethics of Soviet children’s literature. Instead of Dahl’s Chocolate Factory, Soviet children could watch on TV Vladimir Degtiarev’s animated film Sladkaia skazka [A sweet fairy tale] (Degtiarev 1970; screenplay by Grigorii Oster), which had a similar plot except that, first, it was adjusted to suit an alternative pedagogical strategy and, second, it provided an unusual interpretation of the traditional cautionary tale. In The Chocolate Factory, a single boy was selected from a group of spoiled children for an award. No such individualism could be accepted by Soviet filmmakers and writers. By contrast, there was only one negative character in Degtiarev’s version of the plot. Moreover, even this character reformed under the beneficent influence of his friends. This difference, corresponding to socialist morality, perfectly marks the border between Soviet and non-Soviet art. But there is another aspect which is no less important. The point is that Degtiarev’s adaptation was an animated puppet film; moreover, these puppets played the roles not of human beings but of toys—a doll, a teddy bear, etc. So punishment for a child’s transgressions was imposed on a substitute, namely, on an animated toy that nonetheless remains insensitive to suffering—a greedy little dragon. (Before his transfiguration the little dragon falls into a tank full of chocolate and goes through a machine for making chocolate bars—completely by chance, of course.) It was only after such alterations that a narrative based on the idea of a cautionary tale and Dahl’s plot could appear before an audience in the USSR. Of course, books like Dahl’s were in danger of ostracism always and everywhere. For Soviet art, however, the implicit taboo against topics of this kind was, with only few exclusions, absolute. Whether we touch upon chocolate consumption or cannibalism, food and eating is a good opportunity to discuss the social construction of childhood in terms of which emotions are shared—or are not shared—by both adults and children. Let me give just one more example. Carolyn Daniel’s book Voracious Children: Who Eats Whom in Children’s Literature (Daniel 2006) examines (among other things) how the process of eating, on the one hand, helps to distinguish good from evil and, on

Western Monsters 201 the other hand, undermines this criterion. Daniel recalls a dialogue from Brooks White’s Charlotte’s Web (1952), in which a sympathetic character, the spider, tells her equally sympathetic friend, the pig, how much she likes to consume insects: “Delicious. Of course, I don’t really eat them. I drink them—drink their blood. I love blood,” said Charlotte, and her pleasant, thin voice grew even thinner and more pleasant. “Don’t say that!” groaned Wilbur. “Please don’t say things like that!” (White 1997) It is impossible to find something similar in Soviet children’s books about friendship. Only enemies, according to unspoken rules, could be portrayed as bloodthirsty—although not so bloodthirsty as to be invincible. Thus, in the late USSR, Eduard Uspenskii’s idyllic bestseller Diadia Fedor, pes i kot [Uncle Fyodor, his dog and his cat] about a boy, a cat, and a dog living together in the countryside (Uspenskii 1974) can be considered an analogue of White’s narrative. There were, of course, conflicts between the characters in Uspenskii’s stories, but these were not (and could not be) so fundamental as antagonistic food chain relationships. In conclusion, Soviet art zealously sought to oust certain fundamental emotions and corresponding motifs from the field of aesthetic representation. This manifested itself in careful genre selection, the development of an appropriate poetics, as well as in particular ways of interpreting imagery and in critics’ manipulation of reception. Regarding violence and fear, replacing the heroes of the shocking literature of the famine of the 1920s with gentle man-eaters was one of numerous embodiments of a more widespread discourse, which, together with other trends, was shaping the ethical and aesthetic canon of Soviet childhood—and, perhaps, not only childhood. Both children and adult consumers of Soviet cultural production had strictly limited rational and emotional contact with pure ontological evil or, as Lovecraft put it in his essay Supernatural Horror in Literature, “cosmic fear in its purest sense” (Lovecraft 2008, 1043). Any attempts to articulate real fears (those caused by social catastrophes and natural disasters, etc.) were suppressed or carefully filtered. As regards unreal fears, it is enough to note again that the “horror factory,” so important in the US and Europe, never existed in the USSR. Thus, fear and trembling were a part of private discourse or an element in underground art only. They lacked the legal status enjoyed by horror culture in the West. In political discourse, Marxism afforded a good opportunity to suppress fear, referring almost exclusively to its social but not natural character: social evil was treated as temporary and surmountable, therefore, as less terrifying. Artistic production had its owns strategies for the devaluation of evil and, in principle, there was no difference in this respect

202  Valerii Viugin between art for adults and art for children. The field of translation was not an exception to the general rule. Moreover, it is often much easier to see these obscure, repressed aspects of the Soviet politics of evil through the parallels provided by a comparative analysis of translations and their originals.

Note 1 The title alludes to the folk expression, “When you cut wood, chips will fly,” making it a sardonic allusion to the enormous loss of human life.

References Baring-Gould, W., and C. (eds.). 1962. The Annotat Mother Goose, Nursery Rhymes Old and New. Arranged and explained by William S. Baring-Gould & Ceil Baring-Gould. New York: C. N. Potter. Brenner, Joachim F. 1894. Besuch bei den Kannibalen Sumatras: erste Durchquerung der unabhängigen Batak-Lande. Würzburg: L. Woerl. Brenner, Ioakhim F. 1924. Tri mesiatsa sredi liudoedov Sumatry [Three months among the Sumatran cannibals]. Translated by N. Beresin. Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo. Chukovskii, Kornei I. 2012a. “Barmalei.” In Sobranie sochinenii [Collected works]. 2nd Edition, edited by Elena Ivanova, I, 50–59. Moscow: Agentstvo FTM, Ltd. PDF e-book. Chukovskii, Kornei I. 2012b. “Barabek.” In Sobranie sochinenii [Collected works]. 2nd Edition, edited by Elena Ivanova, I, 171. Moscow: Agentstvo FTM, Ltd. PDF e-book. Chukovskii, Kornei I. 2012c. “Odoleem Barmaleia” [Let’s conquer Barmalei]. In Sobranie sochinenii [Collected works]. 2nd Edition, edited by Elena Ivanova, I, 454–490. Moscow: Agentstvo FTM, Ltd. PDF e-book. Chukovskii, Nikolai K. 1927. Kapitan Dzheims Kuk [Captain James Cook]. Moscow and Leningrad: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo. Chukovskii, Nikolai K. 1930. Оdin sredi liudoedov [Alone among cannibals]. Moscow and Leningrad: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo. Dahl, Roald. 1964. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. New York: Knopf. Daniel, Сarolyn. 2006. Voracious Children: Who Eats Whom in Children’s Literature. New York: Routledge. Etkind, Efim G. 1963. Poeziia i perevod [Poetry and translation]. Moscow and Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel’. Frank, David B. 1926. Liudoedstvo [Anthropophagy]. Ekaterinoslav. Georgievskii, Konstantin N. and Viktor M. Kogan (eds.). 1922. O golode [On famine]. Kharkov: Nauchnaia mysl’. Gernet, Mikhail N. 1927. “Golod i prestupnost’ [Famine and crime]. ” In Vliianie neurozhaev na narodnoe khoziaistvo Rossii [The impact of crop failures on the Russian national economy], edited by Vladimir G. Groman, Vol. 2, 94–132. Moscow: Rossiiskaia assotsiatsiia nauchno-issledovatel’skikh institutov obshchestvennykh nauk.Gor’kii Maksim. 1974. “Dorogie moi deti!” [My dear children!] In Polnoe sobranie sochinenii [Complete works], edited by Leonid Leonov, XX, 634. Moscow: Nauka.

Western Monsters 203 Inggs, Judith A. 2011. “Censorship and Translated Children’s Literature in the Soviet Union: The Example of the ‘Wizards Oz’ and ‘Goodwin.’ ” Target 23 (1): 77–91. Ioffe, Mark L. 1971. Desiat’ ocherkov o khudozhnikakh-satirikakh [Ten essays on caricaturists]. Moscow: Sovetskii khudozhnik. Kliuev, Nikolai A. 1954. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii [Complete works]. Edited by Boris Filippov. New York: Izd. im. Chekhova. Kollodi, Karlo [Collodi, Carlo]. 1959. Prikliucheniia Pinokkio: Istoriia dereviannogo chelovechka [The adventures of Pinocchio: Story of a wooden boy]. Translated with an introdroduction by Emmanuil G. Kazakevich. Moscow: Detskaia Literatura. Kruchenykh, Aleksei E. 1922. Golodniak [The famine]. Moscow. Lang, Andrew (ed.). 1897. The Nursery Rhyme Book, edited by Andrew Lang. London and New York: F. Warne and Co. Lofting, Hugh John. 1930. The Story of Doctor Dolittle. New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company. Lovecraft, Howard Phillips. 2008. The Fiction: Complete and Unabridged. New York: Barnes & Noble. Marshak, Samuil Ia. 1933. “Literaturu—detiam” [Let’s give children literature].” Izvestiia 131 (May 23): 2. Marshak, Samuil Ia. 1968. “Robin-Bobin.” In Sobranie sochinenii [Collected works], edited by Viktor Zhirmunskii, II, 127. Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura. Marshak, Samuil Ia. 1971. “O nasledstve i nasledstvennosti v detskoi literature” [About inheritance and succession in literature for children]. In Sobranie sochinenii [Collected works], edited by Viktor Zhirmunskii, VII, 279–311. Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura. Opochinina, Liudmila E. 1929. Puteshestviia Kuka v stranu liudoedov [Voyages of Captain Cook to the land of cannibals]. Moscow and Leningrad: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo. Peterson, Karl A. 1843. “Molitva” [A prayer]. Zvezdochka 7.1 (9): 229–230. Platonov, Andrei. 2012. “Bezruchka [Armless woman]” In Sukhoi khleb: Rasskazy, skazki [Dry bread: Stories, tales]. 276–287. Moscow: Vremia. Sergeev-Tsenskii, Sergei N. 1929. V grozu [In the storm]. Moscow: Federatsiia. Shklovskii, Viktor B. 1929. O teorii prozy [Theory of prose]. Moscow: Federatsiia. Taylor, Merlin M. 1924. Where Cannibals Roam. London: G. Bles. Teilor [Taylor], Merlin M. 1927. V strane kannibalov: prikliucheniia evropeitsev v Novoi Gvinee [In the land of cannibals: Adventures of Europeans in New Guinea]. Leningrad: P.P. Soikin. Tolstoi, Aleksei N. 1936. Zolotoi kliuchik, ili Prikliucheniia buratino [The golden key, or the adventures of Buratino]. Leningrad: Detskaia literatura. Tsvetaeva, Marina I. 1994. Sobranie sochinenii [Collected works] I—VII. Moscow: Ellis Lak. Uspenskii, Eduard N. 1974. Diadia Fedor, pes i kot [Uncle Fyodor, his dog and his cat]. Moscow: Detskaia Literatura. Vasilevskii, Lev M. 1922. Zhutkaia letopis’ goloda (samoubiistva i antropofagiia) [A horrible chronicle of the famine (suicides and anthropophagy)]. Ufa: Izdanie Ufimskogo gubpolitprosveta. Volkov, Aleksandr Melent’evich. 1939. Volshebnik izumrudnogo goroda [The wizard of the emerald city]. Moscow and Leningrad: Detizdat.

204  Valerii Viugin Voloshin, Maksimilian A. 2003. “Golod” [The famine]. In Sobranie sochinenii [Collected works], edited by Vladimir P. Kupchenko and Aleksandr V. Lavrov, I., 345–346. Moscow: Ellis Lak. White, Elwyn B. 1997. Charlotte’s Web. New York: Barnes & Noble. Zazubrin, Vladimir. 1989. “Shchepka” [The chip]. Sibirskie ogni 2: 3–41.

Films Amal’rik, Leonid A. and Polkovnikov Vladimir I. 1941. Barmalei [The pirate Barmalei]. USSR. Soiuzmul’tfil’m. Brumberg, Zinaida S. and Valentina S. 1938 Kot v sapogakh [Puss in Boots]. USSR. Soiuzmul’tfil’m. Burton, Тim. 2005. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. USA. Warner Bros. Pictures. Degtiarev, Vladimir D. 1970. Sladkaia skazka [A sweet fairy tale]. USSR. Soiuzmul’tfil’m. Dudorov, Anatolii A. and Zil’bershtein Evgenii. 1957. Zvezdnyi mal’chik [The star boy]. USSR. Mosfil’m. Kropachev, Georgii B. and Ershov, Konstantin V. 1967. Vii [Vii: An evil spirit]. USSR. Mosfil’m. Ptushko, Aleksandr L. 1964. Skazka o poteriannom vremeni [A tale of lost time]. USSR. Mosfil’m. Rou, Aleksandr A. 1939. Vasilisa prekrasnaia [Vasilisa the beautiful]. USSR. Tsentral’naia kinostudiia detskikh i iunosheskikh fil’mov im. M. Gor’kogo. Rou, Aleksandr A. 1964. Morozko [Jack Frost]. USSR. Tsentral’naia kinostudiia detskikh i iunosheskikh fil’mov im. M. Gor’kogo. Stuart, Mel. 1971. Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. USA. Warner Bros. Pictures.

13 “The Good Are Always the Merry” British Children’s Literature in Soviet Russia Alexandra Borisenko A distinctive image of British children’s literature was formed in the Soviet Union in the 1960s through the 1980s, and has enjoyed wide popularity ever since. At the beginning of that time period, the translation principles of the so-called Soviet school had already been well established and the rules of the game firmly set. However, as will be shown in this chapter, the practical applications of these principles were much more complex and diverse than the theory suggested, especially in the case of children’s literature.

“Inaccurate Accuracy” In Soviet Russia, theoretical principles pertaining to translation were not always as uniform as in the late-Soviet period. From the 1930s through to the early 1950s, translation accuracy was a subject of heated debate. In pre-revolutionary Russia, no translation standards as such existed; translators often chose to rewrite the works of foreign authors as they pleased, omitting and adding whole chapters, with complete disregard for stylistic devices, and other features.1 Translations were sometimes anonymous; in other cases, the author’s name was not mentioned. No copyright laws were ever applied. In the early 1920s, when the publishing house Vsemirnaia literatura [World literature] was founded on Maksim Gorky’s initiative, the professionalization of translation began, as evidenced in the formulation of translation principles, the founding of translation workshops, and the publication of treatises on translation. Everyone agreed that one of the most important virtues of translation was accuracy (tochnost’), though the term was not properly defined. Later, however, accuracy became a bone of contention: The famous conflict between the well-known translator and theorist Ivan Kashkin and the so-called bukvalisty [literalists] raged for almost two decades. The “literalists” in question included Evgenii Lann and his wife Aleksandra Krivtsova, known for their translations of Dickens, and other translators, mostly associated with the Academia publishing house, who promoted the idea of painstaking attention to the rhetoric and stylistic

206  Alexandra Borisenko features of the original.2 Kashkin, on the other hand, came up with the notion of “realist translation,” which called for translating the “reality behind the text” rather than the text itself.3 The idea of “artistic” versus “formal” accuracy was also championed by Kornei Chukovskii in his seminal book Vysokoe iskusstvo [A High Art] (Chukovskii 1968; Chukovsky 1984). It was Chukovskii who coined the term “inaccurate accuracy” (Chukovskii 1968, 48) for those who were, in his opinion, excessively attached to the formal structure of the original text. The battle against “literalism” was eventually won (at least in theory), and a victorious and somewhat smug feeling emerged among theorists that the Soviet school had found a golden mean, a universal standard for translation.4 This standard, however, proved to vary significantly across genres and literary traditions.

Prose and Poetry When talking about translation in the Soviet Union, it is worth mentioning that prose and poetry were treated quite differently. By the middle of the twentieth century, prose translations were almost exclusively done by professional translators, not authors of original fiction. Many of them were literary scholars, others with a scholarly or scientific background. Poetic translation, however, remained primarily the domain of poets, with the notable exception of classical (Greek and Roman) texts.5 Quite often, the poets did not know the language of the original and worked from a crib, though this was usually not the case with major Western European languages (English, French, German, Spanish). It was considered acceptable to have a number of translations of the same poem, while in prose it was preferable to have one canonical, “adequate” translation that was supposed to replace the original and sometimes even to surpass it. Poetic translation also enjoyed the right to be officially “inaccurate”—it was commonly acknowledged that for poetic purposes the original could be artistically rewritten to the extent that the translator (poet) became a coauthor, especially given the Russian tradition of reproducing rhyme and meter in translated verse. Children’s literature was treated more like poetry, with a far greater degree of freedom than was acceptable in prose translations, and as a result works of children’s literature underwent very considerable changes in translation. The main similarities between the two types of translation (poetic and children’s literature) can be summarized as follows: • • • •

adaptation rather than translation several translations of the same work coexisting in the target culture the translator is often an original poet/writer the translator enjoys the status of an author

The most extreme examples of such adaptation—or, more accurately, appropriation—of children’s literature border on plagiarism. For example,

“The Good Are Always the Merry” 207 Aleksandr Volkov translated The Wizard of Oz6 and later published many sequels only partly based on L. Frank Baum’s work, putting his own name on the cover instead of the author’s—Baum was given a passing mention in the introduction. Analyzing this translation, Judith Inggs comes to the conclusion that “acceptance of such appropriation was not uncommon in the Soviet Union, and was a direct result of the legacy of pre-revolutionary attitudes towards literary translation firmly rooted in a tradition of free translation and rewriting” (Inggs 2011, 79). But this statement can only be applied to children’s literature, as with other forms of literature the Soviet school of translation explicitly broke with the old tradition and established extremely stringent norms. With children’s books, however, appropriation was not uncommon,7 and it has never provoked public disapproval. In fact, there is the widespread opinion in Russia that Volkov immensely improved Baum’s work. This, again, reminds us of poetic appropriations that were quite usual for Russian culture of the nineteenth century. Even in cases of less radical and more traditional adaptations of children’s literature, we sometimes find the name of the translator on the cover alongside the author’s name.

Censorship Matters When discussing accuracy, we must also take into consideration the phenomenon of censorship in the Soviet era. Of course not all the changes made in translations were motivated by censorial restrictions; there were many mistakes and misunderstandings, inevitable in a country behind the iron curtain, and there were always certain corrections conditioned by the implied tastes and sensibilities of the “Soviet reader,” but regarding fiction for adults there was a general consensus that translators were not supposed to exercise their own creative powers to change a work or to add their own writing style. All the major Soviet translation theorists, such asVilen Komissarov, Viktor Vinogradov, Andrei Fedorov, and Ivan Kashkin, insisted in theory on the full and faithful rendering of the original. But there existed an authority, the censor, that could and would require all kinds of modifications, cuts, additions, and rewritings, sometimes drastically changing the original text. Most serious alterations were not made at the translator’s whim but in compliance with the censor’s orders. Of course, this was never mentioned in Soviet books on translation. The main principles of censorship were so straightforward and inexorable that every so often translators opted for self-censorship to avoid trouble. Self-censorship was performed reluctantly, with translators typically trying to save as much of the original text as possible. As Samantha Sherry notes, Examination of translation choices shows that the translators of these texts were engaged in a complex balancing act, altering just

208  Alexandra Borisenko enough to allow the texts to be published. Their inherent grasp of the ‘rules of the game’ allowed them to negotiate a space for their works. (Sherry 2013, 764) There were several common reasons to change or even prohibit a text. Standard textual restrictions concerned everything sexual, obscene, religious, and politically unacceptable. Extratextual restrictions could be applied if an author had objectionable personal views and/or a dubious reputation. It may seem that children’s literature was in a somewhat better position in regard to censorship. It is not often that we come across sexual, obscene, or openly political elements in children’s fiction, especially in fantasy fiction of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Religious elements are more frequent, and they were mostly removed at the preediting stage. An author’s reputation could also become a stumbling block. This happened with C. S. Lewis, who, like Dorothy L. Sayers, was labeled a “religious writer” and so during the Soviet era was only translated unofficially and distributed in samizdat publications.8 The majority of changes we find in translations of children’s literature of the period are quite consistent and systematic, nearly as predictable as censorial requirements for adult fiction. The main strategies employed can be summarized as follows: everything deemed to be sad, morbid, violent, sentimental, ambiguous, complicated, too long, or descriptive was cut out or played down. On the other hand, it was advisable to make the text in question more cheerful, optimistic, dynamic, and straightforward. The interference with the original was openly acknowledged. Instead of the words “translated by” on the title page, we often find such phrases as “told by,” “retold by,” “abridged,” “adapted,” and so on. Even in such a paternalistic society as the Soviet Union, modifications in translations for adults were covered up. Even if a book was mutilated beyond recognition by censorship (which was the case with Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls,9 Tennessee Williams’s plays, and many other works), it was still called a translation and claimed to be “faithfully translated in its entirety.” With children’s books, such a pretense was easily dropped, as it was believed that in this case, as in the case of poetry, certain liberties were permissible. It is important to note that in the period in question (1960s–1980s) such changes in children’s literature were not necessarily a result of imposed restrictions; they could come about as a reflection of a certain social consensus or the translator’s own good will.10 Many statements made by translators in introductions and interviews confirm this. Soviet mass culture put forward a very strong concept of a happy, sunny, carefree childhood, which influenced the translators’ work. In the case of British literature, this preconception came into serious conflict with the Victorian concept of childhood.

“The Good Are Always the Merry” 209 We shall briefly examine the work of three Russian translators of British children’s literature to see how each of them addressed this challenge.

The Sunny World of a Soviet Child: The Case of Boris Zakhoder One of the most famous and prolific translators of British children’s literature was Boris Zakhoder, who retold for Russian readers such masterpieces as Winnie-the-Pooh, Mary Poppins, Alice in Wonderland, and Peter Pan. A gifted poet in his own right, witty, brilliant, always full of humor and optimism, he was the only translator of Winnie-the-Pooh and Mary Poppins during the Soviet period. He changed the composition of both books, omitting the sentimental dedication and two chapters11 in Winnie-the-Pooh, cramming four Mary Poppins books into two, and making various other alterations; but both translations were funny, poetic, light and playful, beloved by readers, and quoted by several generations. Zakhoder had a knack for turning foreign books into “facts of Russian literature,” to use a Soviet catchphrase. Zakhoder’s aversion to sentimentality is noteworthy; he shared this tendency with Soviet critics and censors (though he certainly was not a fan of Soviet ideology in general). Sentimental literature in the vein of Frances Hodgson Burnett was not welcome in the Soviet Union—Burnett herself was never published during the Soviet period (though her works had been translated before 1917), while her Russian counterpart, Lidiia Charskaia, was outright banned, and returned to Russian readers only after perestroika. The same aversion was expressed by Kashkin, who reproached Evgenii Lann for reproducing Dickens’s sentimentality “punctually, to the last teardrop” (1952, 28), which in his opinion was alien to the Soviet reader. While translating Carroll, Zakhoder did his best to make the author acceptable for the Soviet child. He cut out rather sentimental verses at the beginning and at the end of Alice in Wonderland, as well as the final passage. He enjoyed word play, adventures, and parodies, and translated them with inventiveness, brilliance, and panache, but he did not go along with the streak of sadness, loss, and doubt so characteristic of the best Victorian tales. He aspired to make the story lighter and happier, even at the cost of putting aside the sadness and wry humor of its author. The book became known in Russia as “Zakhoder’s Alice.”

The Curious World of a Victorian Author: The Case of Nina Demourova By the time Zakhoder began his work on Alice in Wonderland, another Russian translation had recently been published, the first since 1940.12 The translator’s name was Nina Demourova. She was young, unknown

210  Alexandra Borisenko in the professional world and—a fact both significant and very unusual— did not belong to any translators’ group or union. In the Soviet era it was extremely difficult for a young translator to get a commission and publish a translation on his or her own. The professional community was closed; the work was prestigious, reasonably well-paid and, as a result, fiercely competitive. Demourova was not a student of any wellestablished translator, not a member of the Soviet Writers’ Union or of the Communist Party, not an original writer, and not anyone’s protégée. She had no chance in the world of receiving such an important commission. Nevertheless, she did translate the book, and this happened in the true spirit of Carroll’s eccentric absurdity. A Soviet foreign trade organization called Mezhdunarodnaia kniga [International book] was supposed to select and submit for Russian translation works created in the Eastern Bloc countries. This was a somewhat less prestigious and less competitive field. An official of that establishment saw a fairy tale entitled Alice in Wonderland on a list of books recently published in Bulgaria and, convinced it was the work of a Bulgarian author, ordered its translation from Bulgarian into Russian. The chief editor of the Bulgarian publishing house suggested that the translation be done from English, but the Russian official was adamant. The Bulgarian editor had to ask his Russian friends for advice, and someone told him about a university teacher who used Carroll’s tales for her classes on English stylistics. Thanks to this unlikely turn of events, Nina Demourova translated Alice in Wonderland into Russian. The book was published in Sofia, Bulgaria, in 1967, and Demourova had to go to Bulgaria to collect her fee, presumably for translating the book from Bulgarian; when she arrived, everyone was surprised to learn that she did not speak a word of that language (Demourova 2008, 20–24). In Russia, the translation became an instant hit among people of all ages. Neither an adaptation nor a retelling, it was not oriented toward a Soviet child but rather brought into focus the Victorian author. Carroll’s sentimentality was rendered “to the last teardrop.” It was not just funny and witty, but also sad, strange, and very English in spirit. It had an unusually lengthy and detailed introduction. In other words, this children’s book was translated as a book for grown-ups, hence without the usual liberties taken with children’s literature. This approach was later enhanced in the new version of Demourova’s translation published in the prestigious series Literaturnye pamiatniki [Literary monuments] in 1978. Children’s books were not normally published in such academically inclined and heavily annotated editions, but Carroll qualified as “a world-famous masterpiece,” and the two tales about Alice in that edition were accompanied by a translation of Martin Gardner’s scholarly commentary. In order to achieve coherence between the commentary and the text, Demourova had to rework her translation significantly, and this

“The Good Are Always the Merry” 211 second version has been the one most commonly reproduced ever since. That book became known as “Demourova’s Alice.”

Double Reading: The Case of the Two Alices and the Two Peter Pans “Zakhoder’s Alice” appeared in 1971, four years after the first edition of “Demourova’s Alice.” Comparing the two, many readers agreed that Zakhoder’s Alice was more suitable for children and Demourova’s Alice for grown-ups.13 Meanwhile, the idea that different target audiences might need different translations remained anathema for Soviet translation theory.14 When the famous Russian philologist Mikhail Gasparov made this statement in his article “Briusov and Literalism” (Gasparov 1971), he was harshly criticized by other scholars, who insisted on the “golden standard” concept: one perfect translation of every book for everyone and forever. Another example of the double existence of a children’s book is the novel Peter Pan and Wendy by J. M. Barrie. This extremely complicated and controversial book was translated twice during the Soviet era. The translation by Demourova was published in 1968, and the translation by Irina Tokmakova in 1981, by the same publishing house Detgiz (State children’s publishing house). Irina Tokmakova is another prolific translator of British and Scandinavian children’s literature. Like Zakhoder, she was also the author of many original works for children (both prose and poetry). Though not blessed with Zakhoder’s brilliance or his command of the English language, she followed the same basic principles shared by the majority of “children’s” translators (though, admittedly, with very different results). She translated Peter Pan, The Wind in the Willows, some stories by Beatrix Potter, and at some point even Alice in Wonderland (though this translation remained virtually unknown to Russian readers). Comparing the translations by Irina Tokmakova and Nina Demourova is especially relevant because they are contemporaries (almost the same age); they studied together at Moscow State University, quite often translated the same books, certainly dealt with the same restrictions and difficulties, and on numerous occasions described their respective strategies. As usual, Demourova was the groundbreaker. Peter Pan and Wendy was practically unknown in Russia when she undertook the project as the only Russian translation, by L. A. Bubnova, was made in 1918 and had long been out of print. Demourova came across the book in 1956 while in India, where she spent several months working as an interpreter. She bought it from a street vendor in New Delhi by pure chance—the illustrations by Mable Lucy Attwell caught her attention. Back home, she translated it for her own pleasure. Then she took it to the Detgiz

212  Alexandra Borisenko publishers—the only place where a book of this kind could be published. Not surprisingly, it was rejected. Ten years later, after the enormous success of Demourova’s Alice, Detgiz came back to her and offered to publish her translation of Peter Pan and Wendy. Before submitting the manuscript, however, Demourova “committed an act of self-censorship,” as she put it: she deleted the passages that were likely to impede its publication, for example, the one where the children expressed the desire to remain “respectful subjects of the King” (Routh and Demourova 1995, 24). Nonetheless, the editor proposed a number of further cuts and changes. The book was too bloodthirsty, the word “gentleman” too difficult for Soviet children, and Liza the servant had to be removed from the book altogether: she was only ten, and the Darlings (“positive characters!”) were exploiting child labor (something completely unacceptable!). After a fruitless discussion with the editor, Demourova went to visit Kornei Chukovskii, who agreed to help her and furnished her with a letter addressed to the director of Detgiz. This is how she describes the situation: This was what he wrote: October 19, 1967 Dear Vasilii Georgievich [Kompaniets], I have familiarized myself with Nina Mikhailovna Demourova’s translation. I think it is good. Of course, I feel very happy that James Barrie’s book is coming out in Russia, at last. Sixty years ago Gorky gave me an edition with gorgeous illustrations by Rackham and demanded that I translate it. I had no time to do it. Now comrade Demourova has fulfilled Aleksei Maksimovich’s [Gorky’s] old request. I believe that such classics as Barrie must (and may) be translated in full, without removing any episodes or characters. He stopped. “And now for the little maid,” he said. “Since her parents didn’t think it fit to get rid of her before she was born, she may as well be allowed to live.” And he bent over his letter again. I hear the editors want to get rid of an eight-year-old maid who appears in the story. I feel that an eight-year-old maid is not out of place there; let the children know that abroad even such nice people as the Darlings think nothing of exploiting child labor [. . .]. (Routh and Demourova 1995, 26) Liza was left in the book. The word “gentleman” did not appear in the translation, but otherwise there were only minor cuts. However, it is hardly surprising that this story seemed so dangerous to the editor. If there is one book thoroughly unsuitable for a Soviet child, it is Peter Pan and Wendy. It is sad and cruel, ambiguous and hopeless, and complicated

“The Good Are Always the Merry” 213 and subtle. Peter Llewelyn Davies, one of the boys for whom the story was told, called it “that terrible masterpiece” (Barrie 2008, 421). In 1981, Detgiz commissioned Irina Tokmakova to work on a new translation, and this time the editors and translator saw eye to eye. Liza the maid was removed, the cruelty was toned down, and characters and conflicts were simplified and adapted. We can easily follow the logic of the cuts and omissions. For example, at the beginning of the story Barrie introduces his main theme—the brevity of childhood: I suppose she must have looked rather delightful, for Mrs. Darling put her hand to her heart and cried, “Oh, why can’t you remain like this for ever!” This was all that passed between them on the subject, but henceforth Wendy knew that she must grow up. You always know after you are two. Two is the beginning of the end. (Barrie 1986, 21) Tokmakova omits the last two sentences. The story of Mr. and Mrs. Darling is told by the author with dark irony; we can almost discern his jealous scorn: He got all of her, except the innermost box and the kiss. He never knew about the box, and in time he gave up trying for the kiss. Wendy thought Napoleon could have got it, but I can picture him trying, and then going off in a passion, slamming the door. (Barrie 1986, 21) Takim obrazom, mama dostalas’ emu. Vse, krome toi samoi ulybki i samogo poslednego iashchichka. (Barri 2010, 8) [That’s how he got mom. Everything except that smile and the innermost box.] In Tokmakova’s translation, there is no kiss, no Napoleon, and no marital drama. When Barrie describes how mothers tidy up children’s minds, there is a curious list: It would be an easy map if that were all, but there is also first day at school, religion, fathers, the round pond, needle-work, murders, hangings, verbs that take the dative, chocolate pudding day, getting into braces, say ninety-nine, three-pence for pulling out your tooth yourself, and so on. . . (Barrie 1986, 23)

214  Alexandra Borisenko In this passage, both Demourova and Tokmakova omit religion, an act of preemptive censorship. Tokmakova also predictably omits hangings (too morbid) and, unexpectedly—fathers. Fathers are supposed to be good, and so they are definitely out of place on this troubling list. She also gets rid of a father on another occasion: Children have the strangest adventures without being troubled by them. For instance, they may remember to mention, a week after the event happened, that when they were in the wood they met their dead father and had a game with him. It was in this casual way that Wendy one morning made a disquieting revelation. (Barrie 1986, 25) Odnazhdy utrom Vendi otkryla missis Darling nechto, chto chrezvychaino ee obespokoilo. (Barri 2010, 11) [One morning Wendy told her mother something that worried her immensely]. The translation is laconic—and the dead father is gone. It is interesting to compare the attitude of the two translators to the author’s text and editorial demands. As Demourova states: Of course, I could have agreed to remove scenes and episodes from Barrie’s book, cut down certain passages, but I felt very strongly that the original should not be meddled with. It would lose its chiaroscuro, its originality, would become flat and commonplace. Barrie’s might be a whimsical voice, but it was an individual voice immediately recognizable and who were we to make an attempt upon an individual? (Routh and Demourova 1995, 24) As soon as it became possible, with the advent of the perestroika, Demourova restored the excised passages in subsequent editions. She could never speak about editorial interference without anger and distress. Tokmakova, on the contrary, recalls her interactions with the editors of Detgiz with great warmth. She never made any attempt to change the initial version of the translation, and in a recent video interview complacently explains that she and the editors had decided together that “retelling” would be more suitable than translation, because the book was “a trifle too complicated.” She considers her translation quite faithful, though she admits that to a certain extent she became a coauthor. “There was no commerce in children’s literature then,” she nostalgically

“The Good Are Always the Merry” 215 adds. “No foreign agents, no copyright. One could just take a good book and translate it. But mostly it’s Barrie, without a doubt,” she concludes (Tokmakova 2012).15 But certain doubt remains. Barrie is ingenious in his double address technique;16 as Peter Hollindale puts it, “The adult reader is a helpless intermediary between Barrie and the child, caught in storytelling crossfire and receiving bullet wounds intended for him or her alone” (Barrie 2008, xxi). With Tokmakova, we can be sure that no bullets will reach the target.

Good Form and Bad Form: The Case of Captain Hook Zakhoder translated Peter Pan, too, although he translated not the novel but the text of the play. At least two different versions of the translation were produced, one for the stage adaptation and another for the printed edition, both executed with Zakhoder’s trademark brilliance—and, of course, with a certain degree of translator’s freedom and coauthorship. In his afterword, Zakhoder insisted that the liberties of his translation “were caused by the desire to be faithful to the author and to be understood by a contemporary—young!—spectator” (Barrie 1971, 126). We see again how the translator of children’s literature is focused on the young audience. To be fair, there is nothing exclusively “Soviet” about this approach: all over the world children’s literature is typically adapted rather than translated. The reasoning behind it is often ideological and protective of cultural values of the recipient culture; but it is also practical: children are less experienced readers, they need foreign writing to be clarified, simplified, and tamed. The question, of course, is what is left after all these procedures have been performed. This desire to accommodate a “young reader” is not limited to translations. Thus, Hollindale writes in his introduction: For children, in both the stories there are three particular difficulties, which need perhaps to be removed by some judicious cutting. The sentimental whimsy is less troublesome for children than for adults, and still requires some pruning: not many children will either understand or like the fanciful chore of tidying up little minds, in the first chapters of Peter and Wendy, and other such passages call for surgical action. Passages dealing with private, esoteric knowledge are also candidates for excision. Hook’s Etonian reminiscences, for instance, are full of sharp-edge comedy for those familiar with the English public school system, but cause irritation and bemusement to most children. [. . .] The third and biggest obstacle is caused by Barrie’s incorrigible taste for parody. (Barrie 2008, xxii)

216  Alexandra Borisenko These suggestions for “deft editing” are not so dissimilar from the requirements of a Soviet editor. “Sentimental whimsy” is definitely out of fashion. As for Etonian associations, Barrie included them partly as a game—his most immediate audience, the Llewelyn Davies boys, were at Eton when the book was being written. But the character of Captain Hook is extremely important to the author. He came back to it in his later work, writing in 1925 the short story “Jas. Hook in Eton, or the Solitary.” Critics also take Hook seriously: Hook is a Satan to Peter’s Christ, a Satan in the manner of Paradise Lost. Despite his supposedly nightmare qualities he is not really a figure of terror [. . .] but a morally ambiguous and, as Peter says, “not unheroic character.” He has the injured and more than slightly comic pride of a fallen angel nursing his dignity. (Carpenter 1985, 182–183) While British readers may have some hope of making sense of this dramatic character, for a translator he presents an almost unsolvable problem. There was nothing in Soviet culture even remotely similar to public schools with their gentleman’s code of behavior, to say nothing of the esoteric Etonian jargon (“wall game,” “to send up for good,” etc.). It is, therefore, completely understandable that all references to Eton were removed from Tokmakova’s translation. Not just sentences, but whole passages are missing. In her version, Hook is an exemplary villain, and Barrie’s “James Hook, thou not wholly unheroic figure, farewell” (Barrie 1986, 123) is translated with the opposite meaning: “Dzheims Kriuk, s etoi minuty perestavshii byt’ geroicheskoi lichnost’iu, proshchai navsegda!” [“James Hook, who from this minute ceased to be a heroic figure, farewell!”] (Barri 2010, 138). Zakhoder had a simpler task: in the play the only indication of Hook’s academic past is his Latin glorification of the school at the most dramatic moment: “That not wholly unheroic figure climbs the bulwarks murmuring ‘Floreat Etona,’ and prostrates himself into the water, where the crocodile is waiting for him open-mouthed.” (Barrie 1995, 146) Zakhoder makes Hook a comic character who has simply lost his mind by the end. He even gives him some Latin: “Rassudok pirata pomrachilsia. Kriuk, zapevaia studencheskuiu pesniu Gaudeamus igitur, karabkaetsia na poruchni i padaet v vodu, gde navstrechu emu gostepriimno raskryvaetsia past’ krokodila.” [The pirate’s mind got clouded. Murmuring the student song Gaudeamus igitur, Hook climbs the bulwarks and prostrates himself into the water, where the crocodile’s jaws hospitably open to greet him.] (Barri 1971, 104). Surprisingly, Demourova makes an almost hopeless attempt to preserve the Etonian associations. She does it through descriptive translation: there is no “wall game,” but “football team of his famous school,”

“The Good Are Always the Merry” 217 he is not “sent up for good,” but “summoned to the principal” (Barri 1968). Hook, however, is pictured in all his dramatic complexity. Moreover, in 1986, Raduga press published Peter Pan in English for Russian readers, with an introduction and detailed commentary by Demourova, in which all those expressions were meticulously explained (Barri 1986). Demourova was probably the only translator of children’s literature during the Soviet era who consistently treated children’s and adult literature in the same manner, trying to bring home as much British context as possible by means of footnotes, annotations, introductions, and accompanying articles. All her strategies went against the grain of established Soviet practices, and yet her translations were extremely popular among readers and have considerably influenced the reception of British children’s literature in Russia.

Conclusion Samantha Sherry defines censorship “as a multi-faceted practice of cultural regulation characterized by mediation; that is, the process of negotiation between different actors, each with vested interests in the processes of cultural production” (Sherry 2010, 2). Such a broad definition makes it particularly important to distinguish between censorship proper, imposed by authorities, giving no choice to translator and editor, and “cultural regulation,” which can be negotiable and, in many cases, voluntary on the part of the actors. Sherry emphasizes resistance to censorship: “censorial agents below the level of government or party combine both censorial action and resistance against this very action” (Sherry 2013, 758). In the case of children’s literature, the translator still resisted censorship (but had to comply with it), while at the same time enjoying freedom that was unthinkable for a translator of adult fiction. In many cases this freedom was gratefully accepted, and the original text was considerably changed by the translator’s own will. In spite of all the editorial demands and restrictions, the individual translator had much more choice and flexibility within this “children’s” mode, including the option to ignore the mode altogether, treating the text as a work of adult fiction (as proved by the case of Demourova). If everything’s got a moral, as Carroll’s Duchess insisted, the moral of our story is this: in spite of all the stereotypes, traditions, and impediments, it only takes one person to break the mold.

Notes 1 See, for example, Marina Kostionova’s chapter in the present volume. 2 About the conflict between Kashkin and the “literalists,” see also Borisenko 2007; Azov 2013; Witt 2016. 3 On realist translation, see also Leighton 1991, 72–82 and Azov 2013, 96–105. 4 This conviction explains at least partly why Soviet and even post-Soviet translation theory was never particularly interested in the Western discourse

218  Alexandra Borisenko launched by Schleiermacher and Goethe and later continued in Venuti’s opposition of foreignizing and domesticating strategies. The problem was considered solved, the discussion closed. 5 See Khotimsky’s chapter in this volume. 6 About this translation, see also Inggs 2011 and Valerii Viugin’s chapter in this volume. Inggs’s suggestion that Volkov decided to rewrite Baum’s books to avoid censorship seems rather far-fetched. 7 In her presentation at the conference “The Legacy of the Soviet Translation School” (Moscow State University, March 2015), Irina Alekseeva provided several examples of such appropriation from German-language children’s literature. 8 For example, see the interview with Natalia Trauberg, one of the most wellknown translators of C. S. Lewis: http://narnianews.ru/modules.php?name= Forums&file=viewtopic&t=707 9 See the article on Russian translations of Hemingway by Ekaterina Kuznetsova in this volume. 10 In the late 1920s and early 1930s, there was an attack on children’s books (bor’ba s chukovshchinoi [fighting Chukovskii’s style]). For a long time, the Soviet regime was extremely suspicious of fairy tales and all works of fantasy. But after the Thaw (a period of liberalization following Stalin’s death), this attitude changed. 11 The two chapters were restored by Zakhoder in the edition of 1990, 30 years after the first publication. 12 The 1940 translation by A. P. Olenich-Gnenenko was the first Soviet translation of Alice in Wonderland; there also existed four pre-1917 translations and one made by Vladimir Nabokov and published in Berlin in 1923. Through the Looking Glass was translated only once, in 1924. 13 By 1980, at least ten Russian translations of Alice in Wonderland existed, but none of them has ever achieved such popularity as Demourova’s and Zakhoder’s versions. 14 In the West, this attitude was quite acceptable: see the chapter on retranslation in Lathey 2010, 161–175. 15 The Soviet Union signed the Copyright Convention in 1973. Works published before 1973 were treated as public domain all until the 1990s. 16 Term introduced by Barbara Wall in her book The Narrator’s Voice: The Dilemma of Children’s Fiction (1991).

References Azov, Andrei. 2013. Poverzhennye bukvalisty. Iz istorii khudozhestvennogo perevoda v SSSR v 1920–1960-e gody [The defeated literalists: From the history of literary translation in the USSR: 1920s—1960s]. Moscow: Izdatel’skii dom Vysshei shkoly ekonomiki. Barri, Dzh, M. [Barrie, J. M.]. 1968. Piter Pen i Vendi [Peter Pan and Wendy]. Translated by N. Demourova. Moscow: Detgiz Publishers. Barri, Dzh, M. [Barrie, J. M.]. 1971. Piter Pen, ili mal’chik, kotoryi ne khotel rasti [Peter Pan, or the boy who didn’t want to grow up]. Translated by Boris Zakhoder. Moscow: Iskusstvo Publishers. Barri, Dzh, M. [Barrie, J. M.]. 2010. Piter Pen [Peter Pan]. Retold by I. Tokmakova. Moscow: Moscovskie uchebniki. Barrie, J. M. 1986. Peter Pan [English Edition]. Introduction and commentaries by N. Demourova. Moscow: Raduga Publishers. Barrie, J. M. 1995. Peter Pan and Other Plays. (Oxford World’s Classics). Introduction by Peter Hollindale. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press.

“The Good Are Always the Merry” 219 Barrie, J. M. 2008. Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens and Peter and Wendy. (Oxford World’s Classics). Introduction by Peter Hollindale. Oxford: Oxford Paperbacks. Borisenko, Alexandra. 2007. “Ne krichi: bukvalizm!” [Don’t yell: Literalism!] Mosti: Zhurnal perevodchikov 14 (2): 25–34. Carpenter, Humphrey. 1985. Secret Gardens: A Study of the Golden Age of Children’s Literature. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Chukovskii, Kornei. 1968. Vysokoye iskusstvo [A high art]. Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel’. Chukovsky, K. 1984. The Art of Translation: Kornei Chukovsky’s A High Art. Translator and edited by Lauren Leighton. Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press. Demourova, Nina. 2008. Kartinki i razgovory, [Pictures and conversations] 17–28. St. Petersburg:Vita Nova. Gasparov, Mikhail. 1971. “Briusov i bukvalizm” [Briusov and literalism]. In Masterstvo perevoda VIII: 88–129. Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel. Kashkin, Ivan. 1952. “Lozhnyi printsip i nepriemlemye rezul’taty” [A false principle and unacceptable results]. Inostrannye iazyki v shkole [Foreign languages at school] 2: 22–41. Kerroll, L’iuis [Carroll, Lewis]. 1967. Alisa v strane chudes: Skvoz’ zerkalo i chto tam uvidela Alisa [Alice in Wonderland: Through the Looking-glass and What Alice Saw There]. Translated by N. Demourova. Sofia: Literature in Foreign Languages. Kerroll, L’iuis [Carroll, Lewis]. 1975. Alisa v strane chudes [Alice in Wonderland]. Translated by Boris Zakhoder. Moscow: Detgiz Publishers. Kerroll, L’iuis [Carroll, Lewis]. 1978. Alisa v strane chudes i v zazerkal’e [Alice in Wonderland and Behind the Looking-glass]. Series Literaturnye pamiatniki. Moscow: Nauka Publishers. Inggs, Judith. 2011. “Censorship and Translated Children’s literature in the Soviet Union: The Example of the Wizards Oz and Goodwin.” Target 23 (1): 77–91. Lathey, Gillian. 2010. The Role of Translators in Children’s Literature: Invisible Storytellers. London and New York: Routledge. Leighton, Lauren G. 1991. Two Worlds, One Art: Literary Translation in Russia and America. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press. Routh, Chris and Nina Demourova. 1995. The Neverland: Two Flights over the Territory. Hoddesdon: Children’s Books History Society, Occasional Paper II. Sherry, Samantha. 2010. “Censorship in Translation in the Soviet Union: The Manipulative Rewriting of Howard Fast’s Novel.” The Passion of Sacco and Vanzetti Slavonica 16: 1–14. Sherry, Samantha. 2013. “Better Something than Nothing? The Editors and Translators of ‘Inostrannaia Literatura’ as Censorial Agents.” Slavonic and East European Review 90 (1): 731–758. Tokmakova, Irina. 2012. Video-interview by Evgenii Kurneshov. Available online: www.youtube.com/watch?v=PeA5IpUEzGg (Accessed on 26 January 2017). Wall, Barbara. 1991. The Narrator’s Voice: The Dilemma of Children’s Fiction. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Witt, Susanna. 2016. “Byron’s ‘Don Juan’ in Russian and the ‘Soviet School of Translation.’ ” Translation and Interpreting Studies 11 (1): 23–43.

14 “The Tenth Muse” Reconceptualizing Poetry Translation in the Soviet Era Maria Khotimsky

In his address to the Central Asian Conference on Literary Translation, Nikolai Chukovskii, himself a translator, referred to poetic translation as “The Tenth Muse”: Ancient Greeks had nine Muses based on different kinds of art, but they did not have a Muse of translation. Not because they did not see translation as an art, but because this art does not require its own Muse, since it is a part of poetry and literature. Most major poets and writers of the past created translations along with their own poems. The same situation exists now in our country, especially in the Soviet and autonomous republics. (Chukovskii 1961, 3; 2007, 154)1 As Chukovskii explained, poetic translation does not have its own Muse because it should be treated on a par with creative writing. And while he went on to critique some of the practices that emerged during the Soviet era (such as the use of podstrochniki, or interlinear prose trots), he praised the art of poetic translation both in pre-revolutionary Russian poetry and in Soviet literature. The title of Chukovskii’s article—“The Tenth Muse”—speaks to profound ties between translation and creativity, and aims to establish continuity in the Russian tradition of poetic translation. As Brian James Baer and Natalia Olshanskaya note in their preface to the anthology Russian Writers on Translation, “Major Russian writers and literary critics were not only personally involved in translating from other languages, but also often expressed their views on translation techniques and practices” (Baer and Olshanskaya 2013, 12). Valerii Briusov and Maksimilian Voloshin, for example, commented on the exploratory and innovative nature of translation.2 Within the Russian literary context, translation has played a significant role in introducing new aesthetic currents, poetic techniques, and forms of lyrical self-representation.3 Translating poetry often went hand-in-hand with original writing, and profound poetic dialogues with foreing traditions have shaped the style of many leading Russian writers.

“The Tenth Muse” 221 The rich heritage of the Russian author-translator tradition lends itself to analysis of translation as a hermeneutic process, and several recent studies of Russian poet-translators draw on this theoretical framework when exploring translation as part of the literary heritage of Russian poets in different epochs (Berlina 2014; Scherr 2009; Ram 2007).4 Few studies, however, take into account the fate of this tradition in the new institutional contexts of translation after the Revolution. Contrary to Chukovskii’s emphasis on the continuity, important changes took place in terms of the scope and practice of translation. Several recent studies have addressed the complex ideological underpinnings of Soviet-era translations (Baer 2012 and 2016b; Sherry 2015; Witt 2011, 2013a and 2013b), as well as the significant translation debates that surrounded the restructuring of the field (Azov 2013, Zemskova 2013; Witt 2016a). Translation has been explored as a sphere of resistance and a cultural “niche” for politically unfavorable writers (Bagno and Kazanskii 2000; Baer 2010). More recently, Brian James Baer and Susanna Witt, among others, have drawn attention to the complexity characterizing the position of translation and translators within the sphere of Soviet cultural production, going beyond the binary narratives of political oppression and intellectual resistance (Witt 2015, 2016a and 2016b; Baer 2016a). Much of the scholarship from the Russian side continues to focus on the history of the Soviet translation school (Iasnov 2011; Kochetkova, 2013; Demidova 2014), filling in the lacunae with the publication of translators’ memoirs and biographies. While there are some publications that question the “school” approach to translation and the very definition of this concept (Kukulin 2012; Sedakova 2014), the goal of this chapter is to elaborate on these studies, focusing specifically on Soviet-era approaches to poetry translation. I will first examine some statements from Soviet-era criticism that define “the Soviet school of poetic translation,” and then turn to analysis of textual examples that illustrate some of its key tendencies. When Chukovskii delivered his speech in the early 1960s, the concept of a “Soviet translation school” was already firmly established in criticism and scholarship. Though the detailed history of Soviet-era translation should take into account different stages of its development and contributions by individual scholars and translators, some general trends do emerge. First of all, there is the increasing institutionalization and centralization of the translation field, including more emphasis on professional translation (see Zemskova 2013; Baer 2016a and 2016b). Second, the ideological context, the importance of which has been pointed out in several recent studies (e.g., Sherry 2015) resulted not only in control over the choice of works for translation but also in the “ideologization of norms,” to use Susanna Witt’s apt expression (Witt 2013a), which influenced translation style and editing practices. Summarizing the decades of its existence, scholars point out the following traits of the Soviet literary translation school: the high academic

222  Maria Khotimsky quality of translation editions (including detailed introductions and textual commentaries, such as in the editions of the World Literature and Academia Publishing Houses); the broad though ideologically determined scope of translated works; attention to translation style and to the education of translators (including the development of university programs, as well as formal and informal seminars; and new periodicals dedicated to the translation practice and theory, e.g., Masterstvo perevoda [Craft of Translation] and Tetradi perevodchika [Translator’s Notebooks]). Curiously, many of these features match the list of desirable translation qualities elaborated by Lawrence Venuti in a recent article on the state of contemporary poetic translation into English. As Venuti notes, To translate according to the hermeneutic model and to be capable of addressing translations as interpretive acts, translators must be equipped with an array of qualifications that they do not receive from the prevalent workshop pedagogy. These qualifications start with advanced proficiency in a source language, but include the ability to write a variety of styles in the translating language with clarity, precision, and resonance. Translators must also possess a broad and deep knowledge of translation traditions in the translating language and culture, i.e., a historical grasp of theoretical concepts and practical strategies. And they must be specialists in the fields in which they translate, as those fields have developed in both the source and the translating cultures. (Venuti 2013, 246–247) At first sight, Venuti’s wish for improved translation quality echoes the achievements of the Soviet poetry translation school, in particular, a more thorough academic background for translators, as well as attention to historical context and various stylistic traditions. On the other hand, the very notion of “translation school” placed certain limitations on translators’ activity, especially in translations of poetry, where the idea of norm went against the grain of the author-translator tradition, modeled on the notion of Romantic authorship and open to artistic exploration (see Baer 2016a, Chapter 5, for a detailed discussion of this phenomenon). Bearing in mind its rich history and potential problems, let us turn to Soviet-era approaches to poetry translation, which was frequently extolled as one of the greatest achievements of the “Soviet translation school.” For example, in his address to the Second All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers in 1954, Pavel Antokol’skii remarked, In no other sphere does the Soviet translation style manifest itself as vividly as in the sphere of poetic translations. Its main features are truthfulness in recreating the idea and the form of the original, ideological faithfulness, and aesthetic precision. (Antokol’skii et al. 1955, 29)

“The Tenth Muse” 223 Antokol’skii’s remarks summarize some key features of the “realist translation method” that emerged in Soviet-era translation criticism alongside the official aesthetic doctrine of socialist realism.5 Definitions of “realist translation” emphasized accuracy and equivalence, while calling for “truthfulness to reality”: “The demands of the Soviet translation school are well known: translation should be artistically equivalent to the original. The translator-artist does not repeat the words of the original text, but creatively reflects its artistic reality” (Gachechiladze 1965, 246). Literary norms as well as stylistic expectations of “broad accessibility” (Rossel’s 1965, 13) characterized the prescriptive nature of many of the critical debates. Contemporary scholars define the main trend of literary translation in the Soviet era as strongly domesticating. Summarizing critical debates on translation in the 1930s—1950s, Andrei Azov points out that “translation that violates the poetics of the original wins in this epoch” (Azov 2013, 172). But the picture is more nuanced than that. Alongside blatantly ideological debates on the “realist translation method,” one finds in-depth studies of translation history and theory, some of which compare to or predate Western developments in translation studies. Articles and monographs by Iurii Levin, Andrei Fedorov, and Efim Etkind advocated an approach to translation that is based on a thorough understanding of literary styles (Etkind 1963 and 1964; Levin 1963 and 1985). These scholars offered a more nuanced reading of translation methods, comparing “realist translation” to earlier epochs—the Romantic and Classicist. The teleology of literary development, however, defined realist translation as superior to translation practiced in these earlier periods. According to this approach, the task of a translator is to find “functional correspondences, adequate means that produce a similar impression on a reader in a new linguistic environment” (Etkind 1963, 58). Iurii Levin also defined realist translation as based on a detailed comparative analysis of cultural and literary systems and poetic traditions (Levin 1967, 89). The “realist” approach based on comparative philological and stylistic analysis became one of the cornerstones of the Soviet school of poetry translation. Contemporary translation theories allow us to question some of its key presuppositions and to address topics that were not discussed in Soviet-era translation scholarship due to ideological constraints: What is the presumed agency of the translator? What serves as the basis for comparison between different literary systems and styles? What are the evaluative criteria for translation quality? In light of these questions, several underlying presumptions can be identified in the Soviet scholarship on poetry translation: (1) the possibility of achieving an aesthetic ideal in creating the best possible translation variant, (2) the quest for objectivity in analyzing the stylistic system of the original (though differing opinions existed on how to define the translator’s subjectivity (Witt 2013a, 172–173)), (3) a socially and historically oriented interpretive approach (based on the dominant ideology), (4) an emphasis on reception, and

224  Maria Khotimsky (5) finally and significantly, rather specific stylistic expectations of what constitutes “the poetic.” These address most of Venuti’s criteria, with an important exception: “the translator’s ability to describe and reflect on his position” (Venuti 2013, 174). In other words, the “school” approach de-emphasized translators’ subjectivity and the multiple conflicting agendas that determine the “valorized ideological stance” of a translator (Tymoczko 2003, 185). The very notion of negotiating the differences and discovering new possibilities in Russian poetry—a trait that had defined poetic translation in the earlier epochs—becomes less pronounced in this period. The shift toward “objective,” “historically truthful,” and “stylistically adequate” style in translation, as Baer explains, correlated with the general tendency to de-emphasize individual authorship, within the “the culture of imitatio” that was characteristic of Soviet, especially Stalinist, cultural production (Baer 2016a, 122–123). The reasons behind this ranged from censorship restraints (Sherry 2015) and the ideological needs of specific decades (Baer 2016b) to internal struggles within and between translator groups (see Azov 2013; Witt 2016a and 2016b). Its implications for the practices of translation, and, arguably, its effects on poetic culture, were long-ranging. The very notion of a “poetry translation school” emerged at a methodological crossroads, but over time became a kind of cultural currency that long outlived the “realist” tradition. For example, Evgenii Solonovich, a well-known translator from Italian, refers to the “realist” tradition as a mark of translation quality in a recent interview entitled “Slozhnoe iskusstvo perevoda” [The difficult art of translation] (Solonovich 2015). High-quality editions with detailed commentaries and introductions based on the work of many distinguished scholars and translators, along with the established practice of translators’ seminars, contributed to a strong sense of a translation canon, and advanced the notion of translation as “art,” especially concerning translations of poetry.6 And although many critics emphasized (as Nikolai Chukovskii does in his title) the continuity of the pre-revolutionary and the Soviet tradition, such continuity was problematic for several reasons. First of all, the notion of “school” and “canon” was a reflection of complex methodological debates, changing literary policies, and personal conflicts, as demonstrated persuasively in several recent studies (Zemskova 2013; Witt 2013, 2016a and 2016b). Second, many of these discussions centered on the critique or praise of specific translation examples (such as Mikhail Lozinskii’s translations of Dante, Georgii Shengeli and Tatiana Gnedich’s translations of Byron’s Don Juan, competing translations of Shakespeare’s plays, etc.), which, in turn, were penned by translators whose education and literary tastes had been formed before the Revolution. In addition, translation served as a “refuge” for many talented poets and writers who could not publish original poems (to

“The Tenth Muse” 225 mention just a few, Anna Akhmatova, Nikolai Zabolotskii, Mariia Petrovykh, Boris Pasternak, Arsenii Tarkovskii, and Boris Slutskii). Though their work as translators included various models of adaptation to new cultural and ideological contexts, these authors often became mentors for a younger generation of poets. Similarly, many professional translators were seen as guardians of poetic and cultural traditions, educating aspiring young translators not only in their craft but also in the history of Russian poetry, as in the translation seminars led by El’ga Linetskaia, Tatiana Gnedich, and Efim Etkind (Iasnov 1999 and 2012). In turn, individual translation examples were used not only to illustrate the achievements of the translation school but also to support its key theoretical concepts, such as “translatability” (the possibility of conveying the poetic “essence” of a text in another language).7 As Andrei Fedorov, one of the leading Soviet scholars in translation theory explained: “The idea of translatability originated as well from the attempt to conceptualize and theoretically justify truly outstanding achievements of the Soviet masters of translation, [. . .] which include translations by Samuil Marshak, Mikhail Lozinskii, and works of the group of translators led by Ivan Kashkin” (Fedorov 1967, 34). Definitions of the preferred translation method, too, reflected personal, career, and ideological struggles within the translators’ organizations (see Witt 2016a and 2016b). At the same time, the very notion of poetic quality and translator’s craft shifted emphasis from the individual creativity of the translator to the idea of a “poetic standard” that should be embodied in the style of the translations, and in a scholarly approach to volumes of translations. Whereas Pushkin, Zhukovskii, Briusov, Tsvetaeva, and many other poets wrote about the exploratory nature of translation and reflected on the ineffable qualities of this hermeneutic process, Soviet-era translation scholarship took a more positivist stance. One of the fundamental presuppositions of the school approach was the aforementioned idea of the “translatability of poetry.” It relied on a set of divergent (if not conflicting) notions, including: the high cultural value of poetry, the presumption that the poetic essence of a text can be conveyed across linguistic and cultural boundaries; it also placed strong emphasis on formal equivalence and favored rhymed syllabo-tonic verse. Moreover, the very notion of preserving the “poetic” nature of the original was used in ideologically charged statements: We know, for example, that now in the West, the English and the French decidedly reject poetic translation, and instead adopt chopped prosaic interlinear translation. Apparently they believe that poetry is untranslatable, and any attempt to transmit a literary work in a different language is doomed to failure. (Antokol’skii et al. 1955, 31)

226  Maria Khotimsky One cannot help but note the antagonism: the possibility of a “poetic” rendition of a foreign work is defined against “Western” translations in prose. While the pre-revolutionary translations often took the form of rewriting, adaptation, and stylistic experimentation as part of poetic exploration, Soviet-era translations had to conform to a certain idea of a pre-determined poetic “standard,” the criteria of which were discussed in several publications devoted to the translation of poetry, beginning from the 1920s. Early Soviet publications developed by poets and scholars, such as Nikolai Gumilev (1920), Kornei Chukovskii and Andrei Fedorov (1930), and Mikhail Lozinskii (1955), emphasized the need to preserve the rhythmic and compositional structure of the original, while at the same time finding a distinctly Russian poetic rendition for the foreign verse. Another aspect outlined by Gumilev, Briusov, Lozinskii, and later Etkind included a hierarchical and analytical approach to translation, or “the system of priorities and hierarchy of values” (Iasnov 2011, 17). These publications often had a pedagogical purpose, advising translators on general approaches to translation (verse vs. prose, modernizing vs. archaic), and defining textual elements that require special attention in translation (e.g., rendition of specific syntactic structures, grammatical or lexical forms) (Fedorov 1930, 131–195). In other words, translators were encouraged to identify stylistically key elements of a given text and to prioritize them in translation. Due to the insistence on poetic quality, translation criticism often became a battleground for competing approaches, and sometimes served as a pretext for personal and political struggles (as in the case of “formalist” and “realist” translation debates explored by Azov 2013 and Witt 2011 and 2016a). In addition to the critical debates that surrounded translation, translated texts themselves reflected changes in the literary canon, as well as in the conception of the translator’s subjectivity. These range from the projection of a uniform version of poetic language onto original texts to the strong dominance of the poet-translators’ voice, as well as the use of translation as a means of lyrical self-expression or covert communication with readers.8 To follow some of the scenarios that unfolded in translation, let us turn to specific textual examples. The first one involves three versions of William Shakespeare’s sonnets, done by Samuil Marshak, Boris Pasternak, and El’ga Linetskaia. While belonging to the tradition of re-translating the classics of world literature (see Witt 2015 on different tendencies in Soviet-era poetry translation), these translations also present examples of translator’s subjectivity in texts that aspire to be “objective” representations of the poetic canon. Shakespeare translation has received significant attention as part of a project to create a “Soviet pantheon” of world literature (notably, Shakespeare’s portrait graced one of the large banners at the First Congress of Soviet Writers (Makaryk and Price 2006, 5)). Much has been written about the various ideological and cultural aspects of translating

“The Tenth Muse” 227 Shakespeare’s plays (for the Russian and Soviet context, see France 1978; for the Eastern European context, see Stříbrný 2000), as well as the ideological debates surrounding the style of Shakespeare translations (Semenenko 2012). Translations of the sonnets, however, have received much less attention in contemporary translation scholarship (for earlier studies, see Avtonomova and Gasparov 1969 and Etkind 1968, for more recent analysis, see Rassokhina 2016), even though Marshak’s rendition of the entire corpus of sonnets was often quoted as one of the best examples of the Soviet school of poetry translation. Pasternak’s translations, on the contrary, are often viewed as an example of a poet-translator’s dominance over the original text, whereas Linetskaia’s translations are known for their poetic craft and stylistic nuance.9 The following is the text of Sonnet 73, followed by the three Russian versions (Table 14.1): That time of year thou mayst in me behold When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang Upon those boughs which shake against the cold, Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang. In me thou seest the twilight of such day As after sunset fadeth in the west, Which by and by black night doth take away, Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest. In me thou seest the glowing of such fire That on the ashes of his youth doth lie, As the death-bed whereon it must expire, Consumed with that which it was nourished by. This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong, To love that well which thou must leave ere long. (Shakespeare 1967, 149) Table 14.1  Pasternak, 1938

Marshak, 1948

Linetskaia (date undetermined)

To vremia goda vidish’ ty vo mne, Kogda iz list’ev redko gde kakoi, Drozha, zhelteet v vetok golizne, A ptichii svist vezde smenil pokoi. Vo mne ty vidish’ blednyi krai nebes, Gde ot zakata pamiatka odna,

To vremia goda vidish’ ty vo mne, Kogda odin-drugoi bagrianyi list Ot kholoda trepeschet v vyshine— Na khorakh, gde umolk veselyi svist. Vo mne ty vidish’ tot vechernii chas, Kogda poblek na zapade zakat

Ty uznaesh’ vo mne to vremia goda, Kogda lesa stoiat obnazheny, Ikh krony sotriasaet nepogoda, V unylykh gnezdakh ptitsy ne slyshny. Vo mne ty vidish’ sumerki slepye. Neiarok blesk zakatnogo kostra, (Continued)

Table 14.1 (Continued) Pasternak, 1938

Marshak, 1948

Linetskaia (date undetermined)

I, postepenno vziavshi pereves, Ikh opechatyvaet temnota. Vo mne ty vidish’ to sgoran’e pnia, Kogda zola, chto plamenem byla, Stanovitsia mogiloiu ognia, A to, ctho grelo, izoshlo dotla. I, eto vidia, pomni: net tseny Svidan’iam, dni kotorykh sochteny. (Pasternak 2005, Vol. VI, 55)

I kupol neba, otniatyi u nas, Podob’em smerti— sumrakom ob’iat. Vo mne ty vidish’ blesk togo ognia, Kotoryi gasnet v peple proshlykh dnei, I to, chto zhizn’iu bylo dlia menia, Mogiloiu stanovitsia moei. Ty vidish’ vse. No blizost’iu kontsa Tesnee nashi sviazany serdtsa! (Marshak 1948, 50)

I pogasit ogni ego skupye Noch’—skorbnoi smerti krotkaia sestra. Vo mne ty vidish’ ugol’ dogorevshii. Pod gor’kim peplom iunykh snov i sily On dotlevaet, khladnyi, pochernevshii, Sozhzhennyi vsem, chto plamenno liubil. Ty eto znaesh’, i liubov’ moia Tem predannei, chem k smerti blizhe ia. (Linetskaia 2011, 144)

In me you see that time of the year, When one or another crimson leaf Trembles from the cold high above— Up in the skies, where the jolly whistling has gone silent. In me you see that evening hour / Where the sunset in the west has faded/ And the cupola of the sky, taken away from us/ is covered in the resemblance of death— darkness. In me you see the sparks of the fire,/ Which loses light in the ashes of bygone years,/ And that which used to be life for me/Now becomes my grave. You see everything. But our hearts/ Are linked even tighter by this proximity of the end!

You recognize in me that time of the year,/ When the woods stand bare, / And their crowns are being shaken by bad weather,/ And the birds cannot be heard in the nests. In me you see blind dusk. / The flame of the evening fire is not bright, And its bare lights are extinguished by / The night—a quiet sister of somber death. In me you see the amber that has burned through./Under the bitter ashes of young dreams and strengths./ It smolders, cold, darkened,/ Burned by everything that I have loved so passionately. You know that, and my love / Is more devoted, the closer I get to death.

That time of year you see in me, / When rarely one of the leaves / trembling, looks yellow in the bare branches/ and quietness replaces the whistling of birds. In me, you see the pale rim of the skies/ where from the sunset there is only one reminder,/ and slowly, taking the upper hand/ the darkness seals them. In me you see the burning of a tree stump,/ When the ashes, which used to be flame,/Become the grave of fire,/ And that which used to give warmth, has run out completely. Seeing this, remember: priceless are/ The encounters, of which the days are numbered.

“The Tenth Muse” 229 All three translations are bound by the sonnet structure, which makes comparing lexical, syntactic, and rhythmical choices more interesting. The formal virtuosity of all three translators is beyond doubt: all three preserve the rhyme scheme of the original but choose slightly different syntactic arrangements. Marshak’s text is more streamlined rhythmically, whereas Pasternak uses more pyrrhic feet, which makes the rhythm of his translation more uneven (and more close to his own verse). As Efim Etkind remarked, this translation is saturated with “Pasternak’s intonation” (Etkind 1968, 73). Lexical choices in Pasternak’s translation echo his own early lyrics and result in unusual images, such as izoshlo dotla [ran out completely] (archaic); opechatyvaet temnota [the darkness seals up]. Pasternak’s translation also reveals an interesting stylistic collision: traditional expressions (blednyi krai nebes [pale rim of the skies]) appear next to surprising collocations (sgoran’e pnia [the burning of a tree stump]). Somewhat inconsistent stylistically, this text is a typical example of Pasternak’s translation style, where the poet-translator’s voice often overpowers the poetics of the original. This is most evident in the sonnet’s last lines, where Pasternak adds an imperative and a note of urgency and despair, which is reinforced by enjambment: I eto vidia, pomni: net tseny/Svidan’iam, dni kotorykh sochteny [And seeing that remember: priceless are/The encounters, the days of which are numbered]. The historical context of the translation’s appearance (it was published in the literary journal Novyi mir in 1938) makes this note of farewell and despair especially poignant to contemporary readers. Marshak’s renditions of Shakespeare’s sonnets, which garnered the translator the Stalin Prize in literature in 1949, were more unified stylistically. Popular with readers and frequently praised in Soviet-era scholarship, his translations present another typical tendency in the Soviet tradition of poetry translation: consistent stylistic adaptation and rewriting that caters to the criteria of “accessible” poetic language. Though Marshak himself noted that he “translated for the twentieth-century reader” (Marshak 1973, 71), scholars have remarked that the language of his translations is intentionally archaic and based on the poetics of the Pushkin era (Avtonomova and Gasparov 1969, 109). This is manifested both in the use of traditional poetic expressions (bagrianyi list [crimson leaf], pepel proshlykh dnei [the ashes of bygone years], trepeschet [trembles], poblek [has faded] (archaic)), as well as in the very regular rhythm and simplified syntactic structure. In a skeptical look back to the Soviet era, translator Vladimir Mikushevich notes that these texts represent a “classic example of Soviet-era translations, which are ironically divergent from the original” (Mikushevich 2015). Linetskaia’s translation, unpublished in her lifetime, offers another interesting example of the “school” approach to poetic translation—a more nuanced search for a “functional correspondence” for a foreign poetic style. The text is characterized by an elevated and lyrical tone. Some of the images call to mind the nineteenth-century poetics of the

230  Maria Khotimsky Elegiac school: dotlevaet [smolders], khladnyi [cold] (arch.), plamenno liubil [loved passionately] (arch.), and gor’kii pepel [bitter ashes]. The choice of the lexical register and the coherence of images re-inscribe the key image of the sonnet (autumn, defined in a riddle-like description in the beginning of the sonnet) into the Russian poetic landscape, since autumn is one of the frequently used tropes of nineteenth-century poetry. On the other hand, Linetskaia’s version is more stylistically coherent and nuanced than Marshak’s, as it develops key metaphors of the original, such as the image of fire. It also places greater emphasis on the syntactic and semantic paradox of the sonnet’s final two lines. To summarize, all three translations strive to create a Russian text that will produce a poetic impression and be accessible to contemporary readers. In constructing a Russian version of the sonnet’s poetics, all three texts incorporate traditional tropes of Russian nineteenth-century poetry. However, the translators’ choices reveal various processes of negotiation. Marshak’s version is somewhat simplified and consistent in rhythm and syntax; it is more conventional in word choice, thus fulfilling the requirement of “accessibility.” Linetskaia’s translation is more attentive to the diction of the original, but it is tuned to the style of nineteenth-century elegiac poetry. Pasternak’s text conveys the strong voice of the poet-translator. In all three cases, the Russian poetic “Muse” takes over the translated text, allowing for rewriting, variation, and stylistic changes, which, in turn, reflect the personality of the translators. These trends were even more pronounced in the widely accepted practice of translating poetry based on podstrochniki (interlinear prose trots). Seldom encountered in the pre-revolutionary poetic culture, this practice dominated the literary translation scene in Russia from the 1930s onward. Susanna Witt’s research explores the history of this practice, showing its many ideological and political ramifications (see especially Witt 2013b) for the micro-history of podstrochnik as a translation practice). The use of translation via interlinear prose trots was instrumental in advancing the ideal of an inclusive multinational literary canon, and widely used in translations from the languages of the Soviet republics and ethnic minorities (see Zemskova 2013; Baer 2016a). Many Soviet scholars, including Nikolai Chukovskii quoted earlier in this article, were critical of this practice; nevertheless, it took firm hold, and was a frequent subject of critical discussions. In fact, Chukovskii’s speech inspired several follow-up publications in Literaturnaia gazeta, entitled “Zaboty desiatoi muzy” [The Worries of the Tenth Muse], in which one of the local authors defended the use of podstrochniki and claimed that, depending on their quality, they can “transmit” the original text with a varying degree of success: The interlinear prose trot can be compared with an electricity cable. And here, everything depends on the material: we know that different

“The Tenth Muse” 231 metals conduct electricity in a different way. Likewise, the interlinear version can transmit the original on the “2, 3, 4, or 5” grade level, depending on who created this version. (Kakhkhar 1961, 3) Several recent studies have analyzed the debates surrounding podstrochniki (see, most notably, Witt 2011, 2013b), and explored their role in new cultural practices, such as the creation of “national bards” (for example, Dzhambul Dzhabaev).10 The use of podstrochniki led to many widespread tendencies in translation (i.e., group authorship, pseudotranslations, anthologizing “on demand” authors), which are yet to be explored in broader theoretical contexts. Some questions that call for further analysis include the following: How to describe the agency of the translator and the power dynamics in this multi-step translation system? What is the role of the state publishing houses that commissioned such translators? To what extent did prevalent stylistic expectations and editorial interventions influence the outcomes of such translations? The context of the “translation school,” in fact, promoted the use of podstrochniki. Due to the high emphasis on poetic quality, many authors and critics supported this practice, regardless of whether translators knew the language of the original texts or worked with interlinear prose versions. For example, poet and translator of ancient Chinese poetry Aleksandr Gitovich remarked: “It is necessary that the translation becomes part of Russian poetry, and it does not matter to the reader, whether the poet knew the language, or worked with an interlinear trot” (Gitovich 1969, 379). While the quality of poems based on podstrochniki varied greatly, this practice served to reinforce the “school” approach by emphasizing the poetic nature of translated texts as one of the key goals of the translation process. However, various textual modifications that unfolded in translations based on podstrochniki often exceeded the traditional opposition of domesticating and foreignizing approaches. The study of this practice should take into account various historical, cultural, and ideological circumstances, stylistic and poetic expectations, as well as the translator’s agency. One example of such complex dialogic exchange can be found in Maria Petrovykh’s translations of Armenian poetry. Maria Petrovykh (1908–1979) belongs to the generation of poets who had to turn to translation when publishing original works was no longer possible. Part of the group of young translators welcomed by Georgii Shengeli (poet-translator, at the time an editor at the State Publishing House for Literature), Petrovykh devoted her work to translation and editing, while most of her lyric poetry remained unpublished until the late 1960s. Her versions of Armenian poems contain a delicate combination of translation and self-expression, often addressing the topics typical of her own work: love, desire, affection, motherhood, conflict

232  Maria Khotimsky of creative and feminine “selves.” At a time when lyrical poetry was hard to publish and gender-marked poems were a special target of criticism (for example, Anna Akhmatova’s love lyrics were denounced as expressions of “bourgeois” culture), translations of women’s poetry from other cultural traditions were seen as representations of “voices from different republics,” and were welcomed in print. While few Russian women-authors, including Petrovykh herself, could publish original poems devoted to private subjects, they found an outlet for such themes in translating works by contemporary women-authors. Such were Petrovykh’s translations of Armenian poets Silva Kaputikian, Maro Markarian, and Amo Sahian. Among the poems in the lyrical collection by Silva Kaputikian, published in 1947, translations by Petrovykh stand out for their natural diction and the balance of lyrical feeling and poetic form. For example, her translation of Kaputikian’s 1945 poem “V minutu toski” “In the Moment of Despair” reflects the form of the original yet retains the peculiarity of Petrovykh’s own poetic voice. The phonetic transcription of the Armenian text and a close English translation are provided next, followed by Petrovykh’s translation: Ari ari ari Tekuz verchin ankam Tekuz kailov dzhkam Miayn ari ari Tekuz anser ansirt Tekuz hegnogh oo khist Tekuz khaytogh oo birst Miayn ari ari Tekuz beres du indz Mi nor davi kskidz Tekuz urish grkits Miayn ari ari11 (Kaputikian 1984, 147) Petrovykh’s translation: Pridi, pridi, pridi, Khotia by dlia proschan’ia— Khotia by bez zhelan’ia— Pridi, pridi, pridi! Khot’ s kholodom v grudi, Rasseianyi, dalekii, Nasmeshlivyi, zhestokii,— Pridi, pridi, pridi! Pust’ gore vperedi,— Chto plakat’ ob utrate! Khot’ iz chuzhikh ob’iatii— Pridi, pridi, pridi! (Petrovykh 1968, 186)

Come come come Even if for the last time Even if with displeased, angry step Only come come Even if without love, without a heart Even if sarcastically and sternly Even if stinging and rude Only come come Even if you bring to me The new pain Even if from another embrace Only come come Come, come, come, Even for a farewell— Even without desire— Come, come, come! Even with cooled feelings Forgetful, distant, Contemptuous, heartless— Come, come, come! Let there be sorrow,— Why weep about the loss! Even from another’s embrace— Come, come, come!

“The Tenth Muse” 233 This poem is filled with lyricism and undisguised, sincere emotion. Written in a succinct manner, the translation consists of evocative elliptical sentences addressed to the beloved. Despite the “negative” descriptions of the addressee (“forgetful, distant”), the invocation is filled with anguish, desire, and admiration. Armenian scholar and translator Levon Mkrtchian praised Petrovykh’s style in translation and editing as filled with fine mastery. In Mkrtchian’s words, Petrovykh was equally critical of “literal translations, because those are far from the original by virtue of being literal and losing the natural freedom of language” and of “free translations, so-called improvisations on the theme of the original” (Mkrtchian, quoted in Saakiants 2015, 31). Mkrtchian’s characterization of Petrovykh embodies the reigning ideas about preferred translation style: the texts had to resemble the original work, yet convey the idea of the “poetic” in the context of the receiving culture. Petrovykh’s translations were often praised for their high poetic quality, and part of the reason was her own personality as a poettranslator. In this and many other lyric poems, the translator’s voice is projected onto the emotions and feelings of the poetic speaker. While Petrovykh’s own lyric poems were not published at the time, attentive readers of Petrovykh’s translations could discern familiar traits from her lyrics in this translation, such as the description of the addressee through a series of epithets that mirror conflicting emotions, and the expression of a poetic self through reticence and self-negation, which are amplified in the translated text. Kaputikian’s text incorporates a typical element of Armenian and, in general, Middle Eastern poetry that dates back to the ancient Persian tradition— namely, redif, or refrain-like repetition, that usually appears after the rhyme in each stanza. The poetic speaker’s threefold call (“come, come, come”) is enhanced by the “i” sound of the Russian word (pridi), which mirrors the sound of the original Armenian text (ari, ari, ari). Short, elliptical, and suggestive, this poem is similar to many of Petrovykh’s own love lyrics that express delicate emotions of doubt and love, admiration, and anguish over separation. In turn, she incorporates redif into her own lyrics (such as in the powerful poem “Voina” [War]). It is not incidental that critics and scholars observed that in these translations of Armenian women-poets one could sense Petrovykh’s own “openness, directness, and spiritual courage” (Nikolaevskaia 1999, 136). This model of creativity and adaptation in translation, where admiration for the foreign author also resulted in an emotional “bond” with the translated poet or text, in turn, offered an outlet for the translator’s creativity. As Baer has noted, it was more common for translations of contemporary poets (Baer 2016a, 117), but it also existed in translations or retranslations of canonical works (such as in Tatiana Gnedich’s translation of Don Juan by Byron, discussed by Susanna Witt (2016b)). Although the choice of

234  Maria Khotimsky texts was not always dependent on the will of the translator, and the methods of translation and the expectations of translation style have changed, Soviet-era translations created new contexts for textual adaptation, resulting in new (and seldom acknowledged) models of translators’ subjectivity. To bring us back to the title, Chukovskii’s idealistic vision of translation as “the Tenth Muse” captures the paradoxical nature of Soviet-era poetry translation, and it points to changing patterns of creativity in the sphere of poetic translation. The “school” approach valued high poetic quality, alluding to the heritage of the pre-revolutionary poet-translators, but it also prized translation as a craft, and advanced the notion of “realist” translation that aspired to a historically and stylistically objective representation of poetic works. Changing institutional conditions and multiple ideological demands resulted in new approaches to translation, but they did not preclude translators’ subjectivity, as shown in the analysis of translations by Marshak, Pasternak, Linetskaia, and Petrovykh. In addition, personal stories of translators, texts, and their histories attest to the enduring legacy of the “Soviet translation school” in Russian cultural memory. The latter is evident in the long-lasting positive reception of the ‘translation school’ heritage, acknowledged by scholars and connoisseurs of poetry. For example, the title of Elena Kalashnikova’s large-scale project of interviewing several generations of Russian translators—Po-russki s liubov’iu [In Russian, with love] (Kalashnikova 2008)—conveys admiration for the translation tradition, as do many of the interviews included in this collection.12 The long-ranging (and sometimes, negative) implications of the ‘school’ approach for the translation field (and for poetry in general) are discussed more rarely. However, as Il’ia Kukulin points out, the set of “ideological filters” affected not only the scope of translated poetry but also the prevalent style, resulting in a certain “fossilization” of poetic culture, e.g., resistance to vers libre, minimalist and visual poetry, or other non-canonical poetic forms (see Kukulin 2012, 156).13 The “school” approach emerged at a particular juncture between the author-translator tradition, which was typical for pre-revolutionary times, and the ideologically and institutionally controlled translation field of the Soviet era. As scholars have shown, the creative potential of translation can be challenged and profoundly changed within an ideologically restrictive context. In order to understand these changes, analysis of translation variants should take into account “the relations that the translation constructs to traditions and conventions, styles and genres, discourses and canons” (Venuti 2013, 192). Within the Soviet cultural context, this relation is even more complicated due to various ideological expectations of historicity, objectivity, translatability, and a rather specific vision of poetic culture. As the earlier analysis suggests, each particular translation represents the intersection of the broader ideological context

“The Tenth Muse” 235 with translators’ own literary and personal evaluative approaches, making the works of the Tenth Muse all the more fascinating.

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238  Maria Khotimsky Nesterov, Anton. 2007. “Odissei i sireny: Amerikanskaia poeziia v Rossii vtoroi poloviny XX veka” [Odysseus and the sirens: American poetry in Russia in the second half of the XX century]. Inostrannaia literatura 10: 81–93. Nikolaevskaia, Elena. 1999. “Taina Marii Petrovykh” [Mariia Petrovykh’s mystery]. In Maria Petrovych. Domolchat’sia do stikhov [To be silent until poems come], 131–138. Moscow: Eksmo-Press. Pasternak, Boris. 2004–2005. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v 11 tomakh [Complete works in 11 volumes]. Moscow: SLOVO. Petrovykh, Mariia. 1968. Dal’nee derevo: Stikhi: Iz armianskoi poezii: Perevody [A Distant Tree: Poems: From Armenian Poetry: Translations]. Erevan: Aiastan. Ram, Harsha. 2007. “Towards a Cross-cultural Poetics of the Contact Zone: Romantic, Modernist, and Soviet Intertextualities in Boris Pasternak’s Translations of T’itsian T’abidze.” Comparative Literature 59 (1): 63–89. Rassokhina, Elena. 2016. “Shakespeare’s ‘Will Sonnets’ in Russian: The Challenge of Translating Sexual Puns.” Translation and Interpreting Studies 11 (1): 44–63. Rossel’s, Vladimir. 1965. “Radi shumiashchikh zelenykh vetvei” [For the green rustling branches]. In Masterstvo Perevoda 1964, edited by K. N. Polonskaia, 12–33. Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo. Saakiants, Karine. 2015. “Iz arkhiva Levona Mkrtchiana: Mariia Petrovykh: redaktor russkikh izdanii armianskoi poezii” [From Levon Mkrtchian’s archive: Mariia Petrovykh as an editor of Russian editions of Armenian poetry]. Vestnik Erevanskogo universiteta: Russkaia filologiia 3: 16–31. Scherr, Barry P. 2009. “Chukovskii’s Whitmans.” Russian Literature 66 (1): 65–98. Sedakova, Olga. 2014. “M. L. Gasparov i inertsiia sovetskogo perevoda” [M. L. Gasparov and the inertia of Soviet translation]. Available online: www.olgas edakova.com/127/1820 (Accessed 20 December 2016). Semenenko, Aleksei. 2012. “Pasternak’s Shakespeare in Wartime Russia.” In Shakespeare and the Second World War: Memory, Culture, Identity, edited by Irena Makaryk, 143–162. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Shakespeare, William. 1967. The Sonnets. Edited by John Dover Wilson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sherry, Samantha. 2015. Discourses of Regulation and Resistance: Censoring Translation in the Stalin and Kruschev Era Soviet Union. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Solonovich, Evgenii. 2015. “Slozhnoe iskusstvo perevoda” [Difficult art of translation]. Literaturnaia gazeta (27 July). Available online: www.lgz.ru/article/-316519-29-07-2015/slozhnoe-iskusstvo-perevoda/ (Accessed 31 July 2015). Stříbrný, Zdeněk. 2000. Shakespeare and Eastern Europe. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Tymoczko, Maria. 2003. “Ideology and the Position of the Translator: In What Sense Is the Translator in Between?” In Apropos of Ideology: Translation Studies on Ideology-Ideologies in Translation Studies, edited by Maria CalzadaPérez, 181–202. Manchester: St. Jerome Publishers. Tyulenev, Sergei. 2012. Translation and the Westernization of Russia. Berlin: Frank & Timme. Venuti, Lawrence. 2013. “The Poet’s Version; or, an Ethics of Translation.” In Translation Changes Everything: Theory and Practice, 173–192. Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon and New York: Routledge.

“The Tenth Muse” 239 Voloshin, Maksimilian. 1989. “Emil’ Verkhran i Valerii Briusov” [Emile Verhaeren and Valerii Briusov]. In Liki tvorchestva, edited by V. A. Manuilov, 427–433. Leningrad: Nauka. Witt, Susanna. 2011. “Between the Lines: Totalitarianism and Translation in the USSR.” In Contexts, Subtexts, and Pretexts: Literary Translation in Eastern Europe and Russia, edited by Brian James Baer, 149–170. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. Witt, Susanna. 2013a. “Arts of Accommodation: The First All-Union Conference of Translators, Moscow, 1936, and the Ideologization of Norms.” In The Art of Accommodation: Literary Translation in Russia, edited by Leon Burnett and Emily Lygo, 141–184. Oxford: Peter Lang. Witt, Susanna. 2013b. “The Shorthand of Empire: ‘Podstrochnik’ Practices and the Making of Soviet Literature.” Ab Imperio 3 (2013): 155–190. Witt, Susanna. 2015. “Pasternak, Łysohorsky and the Significance of ‘Unheroic’ Translation.” Russian Literature 78 (3–4): 755–773. Witt, Susanna. 2016a. “Byron’s ‘Don Juan’ in Russian and the ‘Soviet School of Translation.’ ” Translation and Interpreting Studies 11 (1): 23–43. Witt, Susanna. 2016b. “Translation and Intertextuality in the Soviet-Russian Context: The Case of Georgy Shengeli’s ‘Don Juan.’ ” Slavic & East European Journal 60 (1): 22–48. Zemskova, Elena. 2013. “Translators in the Soviet Writers Union: Pasternak’s Translations from Georgian Poets and Literary Process of the Mid-1930s.” In The Art of Accommodation: Literary Translation in Russia, edited by Leon Burnett and Emily Lygo, 185–211. Oxford: Peter Lang.

15 Translating the Other, Confronting the Self Soviet Poet Boris Slutskii’s Translations of Bertolt Brecht Katharine Hodgson Boris Slutskii began his work as a translator of poetry in the late 1940s, when he could not publish his own poetry. Even when he became established as a published poet, with the appearance of his first collection in 1957, he continued translating many poets from numerous languages, mostly via interlinear translations. His literary executor Iurii Boldyrev estimated that he translated hundreds of different poets from the Soviet Union and abroad (Slutskii 1991, I, 557).14 To judge from his poem “Perevozhu s mongol′skogo i s pol′skogo” [I translate from Mongolian and from Polish], published in 1960, Slutskii saw himself as an engaged and partisan translator who aimed to break down barriers between peoples. In the poem, he asserts his right to refuse to translate work by those he considers to be purveyors of false ideas: [. . .] Rabotaiu s neslykhannoi okhotoiu Ia tol′ko potomu nad perevodami, Chto perevody kazhutsia pekhotoiu, Vzryvaiushchei valy mezhdu narodami. [. . .] Perevozhu pravdivykh i derzaiushchikh. A vy, glashatai idei porochnykh, Liuboi zemli frazery i lguny, Ne suite mne, pozhaluista, podstrochnik— Ne budete vy perevedeny.[. . .] (Slutskii 1991, I, 335)15 [I work with endless enthusiasm on translations only because translations seem like the infantry blowing up the walls between peoples . . . I translate those who are truthful and daring. But you, heralds of false ideas, phrase-mongers and liars, please don’t try to shove your wordfor-word translations at me—you are not going to be translated.]16

Translating the Other 241 In this chapter, I argue that Slutskii’s engagement as a translator went well beyond this statement. Slutskii, like other poet-translators in the Soviet Union, notably Boris Pasternak, actively sought opportunities as a translator to communicate with his audience in ways that he could not through his own poetry. Bertolt Brecht’s work proved to be particularly suited to Slutskii’s purposes. Censorship meant that a huge proportion of Slutskii’s own poetic output remained unpublished at the time of his death in 1986; the work that began to appear in the late 1980s showed his criticism of and disillusion with the Soviet state and its Stalinist legacy. All of his Brecht translations discussed here were, by contrast, published during Slutskii’s lifetime, from the mid-1960s to the early 1970s. Many of them imply parallels between Brecht’s subject matter and Soviet reality.17 While Slutskii’s Brecht translations contributed to the liberal intelligentsia’s promotion of values associated with the post-Stalin Thaw, they also carried considerable personal significance for the poet himself. As I will show, Slutskii’s Brecht translations are connected with Pasternak, who was painfully associated with questions of Slutskii’s own guilt and responsibility.18 Translating Brecht, for Slutskii, involved more than breaking down barriers between peoples or encouraging his readers to see parallels with Soviet reality in a translated text; his encounter with the other led to an encounter with aspects of himself that were difficult to contemplate. To begin with, I will consider the factors that may well have informed Slutskii’s decision to translate Brecht. Brecht represented values that were readily accepted by the receiving culture of the USSR, so translation of his work did not require significant adaptation in order to make it palatable and publishable.19 Brecht’s modernist style was also acceptable now that the avant-garde experimentation of the 1920s was no longer cause for automatic suspicion. According to Efim Etkind, “Brecht did not represent anything foreign to Soviet literature and the Soviet theater. Brecht was the return of our own 1920s” (Etkind 1980, 84). Slutskii, like Brecht, professed his loyalty to Communist ideology and based his poetics on the modernist legacy of the 1920s. In translating Brecht, Slutskii was not so much introducing unfamiliar ideas or forms to the receiving culture, but rather exploiting the similarities between Brecht and Soviet culture to suggest that these texts contained material directly relevant to, and, indeed, well known to a Soviet audience. Slutskii’s approach as a translator relied on what Francesca Billiani describes as the use of the ambiguous status of the translated text, which appears to be “faithful to its original” while being “prone to productive manipulations” (Billiani 2007, 3). Some examples of Slutskii’s “manipulations” will be explored next. It should be noted, however, that his Brecht translations generally adhere very closely to the original text, suggesting perhaps that the intended readers needed little prompting to discover their local relevance.

242  Katharine Hodgson Slutskii reportedly said that translating Brecht was a pleasure, because this gave him an opportunity to learn from a writer cleverer than he was (Ozerov 2009, 342). In a poem published in 1971, “Perevozhu Brekhta” [I am translating Brecht] he evokes the difficulties of forcing Brecht to speak Russian, but is full of admiration for Brecht’s rhetorical skill and toughness. Ia Brekhta gruznogo perevozhu. Perevozhu ia Brekhta neukliuzhego. [. . .] Net, nelegko nemetskuiu voronu po-nashemu zastavit′ govorit′. V nemetskuiu tupuiu oboronu neprosto dver′ tuguiu otvorit′. [. . .] Fonetika kakaia! Tresk i liazg! A logika kakaia! Gegel′ s Kantom! Zato liricheskikh ne tochit lias. Dokazyvaet! S tolkom i talantom! [I’m translating weighty Brecht. I’m translating awkward Brecht . . . No, it’s not easy to force the German crow to speak our language. It’s not simple to open up the firmly closed door of the stubborn German defense. What sounds! Crackle and clank! But what logic! Hegel and Kant! But then he avoids lyric chatter. He proves his case! With good sense and talent! . . .] (Slutskii 1991, II, 390) While Brecht provided Slutskii with a model, I would argue that he also offered something approaching an alternative self, which gave Slutskii new opportunities to communicate with his readers. While both writers shared a commitment to communist ideals, each had serious reservations about the way socialism under Stalin had developed, but struggled to express these reservations. Brecht’s socialist beliefs combined with his awareness of Stalin’s misdeeds in work that was ambivalent and cautious; he resorted to coded references to Stalin rather than voicing his misgivings directly. Slutskii shared his more controversial work with only his closest circle of friends; a few of his poems about Stalin circulated anonymously in manuscript.20 Slutskii and Brecht were conscious of the effects of censorship and state control of culture within Germany and the USSR. What set Brecht apart from Slutskii, however, was the experience of being an outright opponent of, and an exile from Nazi Germany.

Translating the Other 243 Several of the works by Brecht that Slutskii translated were concerned with injustice, political and moral compromise, and censorship—mostly, but not exclusively in the context of Nazi Germany or a fictional preCommunist China. By translating Brecht, Slutskii could speak through someone else’s words, in texts ostensibly dealing with other societies, about concerns expressed in his own unpublished work, and could do this without appearing to challenge Soviet ideological norms. In terms of poetics, Brecht offered his translator texts that were very much in tune with his own work. Neither Brecht nor Slutskii wrote poetry that conformed to the dominant aesthetics of their times. They tended to shy away from regular rhythms and melodic effects; both deployed language that was oriented toward everyday speech. Joseph Brodsky described Slutskii’s poetry as follows: “His verse is a conglomeration of bureaucratese, military lingo, colloquialisms and sloganeering, and it employs with equal ease assonance, dactylic and visual rhymes, sprung rhythms and vernacular cadences” (Brodsky 1985, 12). Ernest Bornemann lists among the distinctive elements in Brecht’s poetic language the everyday speech of Southern Germany, bureaucratic jargon, anglicisms and exotic expressions, and characterizes his work as: “an anti-metaphorical poetry of colours, textures, and other concrete images” (quoted by Esslin 1959, 93). Both created a poetics that appealed to rational thought rather than emotional effect, preferring irregular rhythms to predictable patterns. Slutskii embarked on his task of translating Brecht with all the necessary poetic resources already present in his repertoire. Brecht and Slutskii had one more thing in common: until the postStalin Thaw both were more or less marginalized figures in official Soviet culture. Slutskii could not launch his literary career until the Thaw got under way. His style did not sit easily with Stalin-era literary norms, and, as a Jew, he felt the effects of the postwar “anti-cosmopolitan” campaigns. While Brecht was recognized as a major author of the socialist world, his work was hardly known in the USSR before the mid-1950s. His association with the avant-garde did not endear him to the German Democratic Republic’s Central Committee; a 1951 production of his adaptation of Gorky’s Mother was described by them as “a kind of mixture between Meyerhold and Proletkul’t” (quoted by Esslin 1959, 154).21 Brecht and Slutskii both knew representatives of the Russian Futurist movement of the 1920s. Brecht met playwright and journalist Sergei Tret′iakov in Berlin and Moscow in the early 1930s.22 Brecht also met literary theorist Osip Brik when he traveled to the USSR in 1932 with Sergei Eisenstein. Brik was closely associated with Futurist poets, including Vladimir Maiakovskii, whom Slutskii admired. When a student in the late 1930s, Slutskii joined the literary circle run by Brik at the Moscow Law Institute. He later became a regular guest of Brik’s former wife Lilia, who was for many years Maiakovskii’s lover. The Thaw brought about significant change in the fortunes of both Slutskii and Brecht. Volumes of

244  Katharine Hodgson Brecht’s work in Russian translation began to appear from 1956. Brecht did not, however, live to see the first tour of his theater company the Berliner Ensemble to the Soviet Union in 1957, the same year that Slutskii’s first collection of original poems finally appeared in print. It was only with the Taganka Theater’s production of The Good Person of Szechuan in 1964, directed by Iurii Liubimov, that Brecht’s drama seized the attention of Soviet audiences. The play’s heroine, Shen-Te, the eponymous “good person,” is caught between her desire to help others and the impossibility of helping everyone. She tries to resolve her conflict by creating an alter ego, a callous businessman who amasses wealth by exploiting others. Shen-Te confronts a world in which injustice is passively accepted, though ultimately she is powerless to bring about real change: it is only by harming others that she is able to acquire the money she can use to do good. Moscow theatergoers were quick to see the play’s relevance to their own lives: “The biting satire about evil, conformism, and avarice, which Brecht aimed at capitalist society, became in Liubimov’s production a reflection on Soviet realities. The play hit Moscow like a bombshell” (Zubok 2009, 289). Slutskii, who translated the poems and songs in the play, makes a few apparently minor, though significant changes that suggest parallels with the situation in the USSR. For example, Brecht’s text reads Wenn in einer Stadt ein Unrecht geschieht, muß ein Aufruhr sein [if an injustice takes place in a town, there must be an uproar] (Brecht 1964, 61). Slutskii moves from this isolated occasion of injustice to injustice as a more general state of affairs: Esli gorodom praviat nespravedlivo—on dolzhen vosstat′ [If a city is governed unjustly, it must rise up] (Brekht 1972).23 At a time when the injustices of the Stalin era had been revealed but not resolved, this change of emphasis had an obvious resonance. Next, I shall discuss further departures Slutskii made from the original in this same passage in relation to the personal significance they may have had for him. Before returning to Slutskii’s translation of The Good Person of Szechuan, I will consider the thematic preoccupations of some of the other Brecht poems that Slutskii translated, in addition to those that feature in the play. A significant proportion of them were written during Brecht’s exile from Germany and relate to the Nazi regime and its effects on the German people. While this selection seems perfectly understandable in the highly politicized context of Soviet literature, it is difficult to imagine that Slutskii’s choice was not motivated at least in part by his own familiarity with the kind of things Brecht describes: censorship, compromise, and injustice, all of which he addressed in his own, then unpublished, poetry. Among the poems Slutskii translated are several on the role of literature and writers under an oppressive regime. While Brecht’s poem on book burnings “Die Bücherverbrennung” [The book burning] was easily identifiable with the Third Reich, and his poem “Besuch bei den verbannten Dichtern” [A visit to the banished poets] reflects Brecht’s concerns about

Translating the Other 245 his own exile and loss of contact with readers, both must have had a personal resonance for Slutskii (Brecht 1981, 694; 663–664; Brekht 1972). Slutskii knew only too well what it was like to be a poet without a public. He also knew that there were plenty of Russian poets who depended on the fragile memories of others to ensure their work’s survival. Brecht’s “Besuch bei den verbannten Dichtern” depicts a dream encounter between an unnamed poet and exiled poets including Villon, Dante, and Heine. A “forgotten poet” asks the visitor whether anyone knows his work by heart. Dante explains that this enquiry comes from a poet who was destroyed along with his work. Slutskii’s translation appeared in 1965, when Soviet readers were able to see in print, or in illegally circulated manuscripts, work by some previously forbidden twentiethcentury poets, but could not easily gauge how much had been lost for ever. At the same time Slutskii published his translation of “An die Gleichgeschaltene” [To those brought into line] (Brecht 1981, 679–681; Brekht 1972). The poem’s description of a writer’s slide from opposition to conformity, driven by a determination to protect his livelihood while making apparently minor compromises, is a damning account of moral and artistic degradation, easily recognizable to Slutskii and his Soviet contemporaries. One of the poems Slutskii translated was directly connected with the Soviet Terror of the late 1930s. Brecht’s “Ist das Volk unfehlbar?” [Is the people infallible?] is an uncomfortable series of reflections sparked by the arrest and execution of Tret′iakov in 1937 (Brecht 1981, 743). Each section of the poem ends with the question “Suppose he is innocent?” Here Brecht is operating in Slutskii’s home territory where the innocent cannot expect any protection and the guilty escape justice. Brecht observed as an outsider what Slutskii had witnessed for himself. Besmyslenno trebovat′ bumagi, v kotorykh chernym po belomu stoiali by dokazatel′stva vinovnosti, Potomu chto takikh bumag ne byvaet. Prestupnik derzhit nagotove dokazatel′stva svoei nevinovnosti, U nevinnogo chasto net nikakikh dokazatel′stv. No neuzheli v takom polozhenii luchshe vsego molchat′? A chto, esli on nevinoven? [It is senseless to demand papers on which in black and white there are proofs of guilt, because such papers do not exist. The criminal keeps in readiness the proofs of his innocence. But in such a situation is being silent really the best thing? But what if he is innocent?] (Brekht 1972)

246  Katharine Hodgson There is a shift of emphasis in Slutskii’s translation when it comes to the question of how one should respond to this situation. Brecht asks: Ist also schweigen das beste? [So is it therefore best to be silent?], with no obvious indication of what he thinks the answer should be. Slutskii uses the word neuzheli [really, surely not], an interrogative that implies surprise and disagreement. Creating his translation decades after Brecht wrote the poem, and with the benefit of hindsight, Slutskii moves from the uncertainty of the original to a position that prompts the reader to consider personal complicity. These were matters that Slutskii had been forced by circumstances to deal with. Having been a law student before the war, when he volunteered for military service he was assigned to take part in military tribunals, judging men accused of infringements of military discipline, including deliberate self-mutilation and cowardice. This experience is reflected in several of Slutskii’s own poems that dwell on his part in the condemnation of innocent victims, including the following, first published in 1987: Ia sudil liudei i znaiu tochno, chto sudit’ liudei sovsem neslozhno— tol’ko pogodia byvaet toshno, esli vspomnish’ kak-nibud’ oploshno. Kto oni, moi chetyre puda miasa, chtob sudit’ chuzhoe miaso? Bol’she nikogo sudit’ ne budu. Khorosho byt’ ne vozhdem, a massoi. (Slutskii 1991, I, 145) [I’ve judged my fellow-men; I know for sure that doing this is not something obscure; nausea will grip you only later on, when you recall a judgment you got wrong. So who then is my hundredweight of meat to judge another’s hundredweight? I shall not be a judge, never again. Best not to be the leader, but the led.] (Slutsky 1999, 291)24 Passing judgment was something Slutskii associated with agonizing feelings of guilt. Most of all, he was troubled by his conscience over his public participation in the condemnation of Pasternak. There are hints of this haunting guilt in Slutskii’s translation of Brecht’s “Angesichts der Zustände in dieser Stadt” [In view of conditions in this town], published in 1972. Brecht wrote the poem while an exile in the USA, experiencing what it was like to be almost completely unknown, but subject to repeated scrutiny and surveillance (Lyon 1980, 26, 36, 43). In this poem the speaker states that he has documentary proof of his identity, allows no one to take his word on trust, preferring to present reliable witnesses who can confirm what he says, yet when surprised with questions about

Translating the Other 247 his honesty and trustworthiness, he is unable to justify himself and feels only shame. The concluding lines of Slutskii’s translation read as follows: Vse-taki vremenami, Kogda ia ogorchen ili otvlechen, Sluchaetsia, chto menia zastigaiut vrasplokh Voprosami: ne obmanshchik li ia, ne sovral li ia, Ne taiu li chego-nibud′? I togda ia po-prezhnemu teriaius′, Govoriu neuverenno i zabyvaiu Vse, chto svidetel′stvuet v moiu pol′zu, I vmesto etogo ispytyvaiu styd. [Nevertheless at times, when I am upset or distracted, it can happen that I am caught unawares by questions: am I a fraudster, have I told a lie, am I concealing anything? And then I get flustered as I did before, speak uncertainly and forget everything that testifies in my favor, and instead I experience shame.] (Brekht 1972)25 Slutskii departs from Brecht’s text in ways that accentuate the speaker’s emotional distress in the face of any challenges to his honesty (Brecht 1981, 832). In the second line quoted earlier, he replaces beschäftigt [busy] with ogorchen [upset], emphasizing the speaker’s vulnerability; his emotional state is evoked once more when Slutskii supplies zabyvaiu [I forget] as a translation of verschweige [I keep silent about], shifting the emphasis from the speaker’s deliberate withholding of information that might justify his actions to his inability to vindicate himself. The impression that the poem’s preoccupation with self-justification and shame connects it with Pasternak is reinforced by Slutskii’s choice of the phrase menia zastigaiut vrasplokh [I am caught unawares] to translate the German überrümpelt [caught unawares]. Variants of this phrase appear frequently in Pasternak’s work to evoke moments of epiphany, or sudden turns of fate.26 Here, the phrase chosen by Slutskii conveys effectively the sense of suddenness and surprise present in the source text, and the inability of the apparently blameless speaker to defend himself against accusations of wrongdoing. A variant of the same phrase, zastignutyi vrasplokh [caught unawares] appears in Slutskii’s translation of the songs from The Good Person of Szechuan, linked once more to an attack on an innocent victim whom no one dares to defend from injustice. These words, absent in Brecht’s text, emphasize the suddenness of the assault: Brecht describes the victim merely as der Getroffene [the one who is struck]: O vy, neschastnye! Vashego brata oskorbliaiut, a vy zakryvaete glaza!

248  Katharine Hodgson Zastignutyi vrasplokh krichit, a vy molchite? Nasil′nik khodit mezh vami i vybiraet zhertvu, A vy govorite: On poshchadit nas, Potomu chto my pokorny. [O you unfortunate ones! Your brother is insulted and you close your eyes! The man caught unawares shouts out, but you are silent? The attacker passes among you and chooses a victim, and you say: he will spare us, because we are submissive.] (Brekht 1972) Slutskii’s choice of zastignutyi vrasplokh is one of several departures in this passage from his close adherence to Brecht’s words. Slutskii removes the reference to physical violence in “Eurem Bruder wird Gewalt angetan” [violence is done to your brother], supplying instead: “Vashego brata oskorbliaiut” [your brother is insulted]. Those who look on silently say that they will be spared because, in Slutskii’s translation, “we are submissive”; Brecht’s onlookers “zeigen kein Mißfallen” [show no disapproval]. This change allows Slutskii to portray the crowd’s behavior as a general statement about their passivity. These alterations reinforce a possible allusion to Soviet circumstances, such as the persecution of Pasternak. A victim is selected, denounced, though not physically attacked, and then condemned; no protest is made by those looking on. Slutskii’s Brecht translations, by suggesting numerous parallels between the regime in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, act as “a site of resistance to official Soviet culture and values” (Baer 2010, 149).27 They also hint at Slutskii’s awareness of his own failure to resist. His choice of texts by Brecht reveals a preoccupation with compromise and complicity. Allusions to Pasternak, himself a celebrated translator, in Slutskii’s poem “Trudnosti perevoda” [Difficulties of translation], suggest a confrontation with uncomfortable truths. Pasternak’s translation of Hamlet has been analyzed as an attempt to give readers an example of how to behave with integrity while living under a corrupt regime; Slutskii knew that he had failed to do so in relation to Pasternak.28 In “Trudnosti perevoda” the translator finds himself unexpectedly subjected to public scrutiny on stage. Slutskii’s poem begins Perevodia stikhi, prokhodish′ cherez stenu i s mordoiu v krovi vykhodish′ vdrug na stsenu, pod tysiach′iu svechei, pred tysiach′iu ochei, skvoz′ kladku kirpichei probivshis′, kak ruchei. . .

Translating the Other 249 [Translating poetry, you pass through a wall, and with your face bloodied you suddenly come out onto a stage, beneath thousands of candles, before thousands of eyes, having broken through the brickwork like a stream. . .] (Slutskii 1977) There are echoes here of Pasternak’s “Gamlet” [Hamlet], the introductory poem of the Zhivago cycle in the novel Doctor Zhivago, in which the speaker walks out on stage to face the spectators’ gaze (Pasternak 1989–1992, III, 511). A comparison of the two speakers’ situations is invited both by the stage setting, and particularly by the similarity of Slutskii’s phrase pred tysiach′iu ochei [before thousands of eyes] and Pasternak’s tysiach′iu binoklei na osi [by way of a thousand binoculars]. The speakers’ situations do differ in one important respect: Pasternak’s speaker goes out on stage fully aware of what is to come, echoing Christ’s plea in Luke 22: 39 that he might be spared his ordeal, while Slutskii’s emerges suddenly, to be confronted by the unexpected. “Trudnosti perevoda” repeats Slutskii’s image of translation as a process of breaking through walls introduced in “Perevozhu s mongol′skogo i s pol’skogo” [I translate from Mongolian and Polish], in which translations are likened to infantry soldiers blowing up the walls separating the peoples. Slutskii also uses similes drawn from warfare in “Perevozhu Brekhta,” including, in the first published version of the poem, a stanza likening the stubborn resistance of Brecht’s text to the resistance put up by Berlin against advancing Soviet forces.29 In “Trudnosti perevoda,” however, the image of translation as combat emphasizes the physical strain and injury suffered by the translator as he breaks through the wall. The poem concludes with a more conventional evocation of the “difficulties of translation”: the speaker stands before his audience as if waiting for their verdict on his performance: Stoish′ ty nalegke, illiuzii ne stroia, razmazav po shcheke kirpich i slezy s krov′iu. Skvoz′ steny, skvoz′ beton, skvoz′ temnotu streliaia, nashel ty vernyi ton? Popal ty v tsel′? Ne znaiu. [You stand lightly clad, harboring no illusions, with your cheek smeared by brick dust, tears, and blood. Through walls, through concrete, through darkness shooting, have you found the right tone? Have you hit the target? I don’t know.]

250  Katharine Hodgson This poem, with its attempts to generalize and depersonalize the situation, addressing an unnamed “you” rather than speaking in the first person, could be read as Slutskii’s contribution to the Soviet intelligentsia myth of the self-sacrificing, heroic translator (Baer 2010, 163–165). Yet the dramatic imagery of the wounded and exposed translator seems peculiarly personal. The allusions to Pasternak in “Trudnosti perevoda” extend to a poem of 1931 that again sees the poet in terms of an actor on stage who must accept not pretense, but polnoi gibeli vser′ez [complete destruction in earnest]. The poem begins by evoking the fatal power of poetry and linking it with blood: O, znal by ia, chto tak byvaet. Kogda puskalsia na debiut, Chto strochki s krov′iu—ubivaiut, Nakhlynut gorlom i ub′iut! [O, had I known that this is what happens, when I set out on my debut, that lines of verse can kill with blood, will gush into the throat and kill!] (Pasternak 1989–1992, I, 412) In Slutskii’s poem the image of the battered and bleeding translator revealed to public scrutiny on stage suggests, through allusions to both “Gamlet” and “O, znal by ia,” an affinity with fellow-translator Pasternak, who fell victim to the campaign of persecution in which Slutskii took part. Both victim and perpetrator are subject to forces beyond their control; in Slutskii’s case, most probably, he acted according to the dictates of Communist Party discipline, which was of no use in helping him to evade a sense of shame. Slutskii’s poems about himself as a translator range from the confident self-justification of “Perevozhu s mongol′skogo i s pol′skogo,” to the admiring near-exasperation of “Perevozhu Brekhta,” to the predicament of the translator in “Trudnosti perevoda.” I would argue that the difficulty Slutskii portrays in this poem is that engagement with someone else’s text has brought the translator, perhaps inadvertently, to the point of revealing something about himself. The wall torn down so painfully in the act of translation looks more like the barrier that has shielded the translator from uncomfortable scrutiny. If translation can be seen as “a cultural weapon” that may be used “in a struggle to break down the norms of an established system,” then “Trudnosti perevoda” suggests that this weapon may sometimes be turned against the translator (Gentzler 1996, 120). The recurring allusions to Pasternak, both here in the poem and in Slutskii’s translations of Brecht, suggest that Slutskii’s engagement with a poet who could be seen as his “alternative self” led him by way of the persistent emphasis on compromise and guilt in Brecht’s texts to a confrontation with himself.

Translating the Other 251

Notes 1 Nikolai Chukovskii (1904–1965) was the son of famous translator, literary critic, and author of children’s literature, Kornei Chukovskii (1882–1969), who was one of the leading figures in the literary translation field after the Revolution. This quotation implies the publishing situation in Soviet republics and autonomous republics other than the dominating Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (R.S.F.S.R.). 2 Cf. Briusov: “To transmit a poet’s creation from one language to another is impossible, but it is equally impossible to relinquish this dream” (Valerii Briusov, “Violets in the crucible,” in Baer and Olshanskaya 2013, 68); Voloshin: “A good poetic translation is a miracle, inexplicable to the translator himself [. . .] a participation in the creative activity . . .” (Voloshin 1988, 97). 3 On the history of poetic translation in Russia, see Friedberg 1997; Leighton 1991, as well as recent collected volumes: Baer 2011; Burnett and Lygo 2013. 4 To list some examples: Berlina 2014; Scherr 2009; Ram 2007. Among more recent studies that address the role of translation in the development of the literary system in the Russian context are: Cooper 2007; Tyulenev 2012. 5 For more on the “realist” method in translation, see Chapter 3 of Andrei Azov’s monograph (Azov 2013). 6 For example, in recent years, several Russian publishing houses have started a special series devoted to the works of famous translators: Mastera perevoda [Masters of translation] (Terra knizhnyi klub, Moscow) has published collected translations by Vil’gel’m Levik, Mikhail Iasnov, Anatolii Geleskul, Grigorii Kruzhkov, Nikolai Zabolotskii, and Boris Pasternak, while Korifei khudozhestvennogo perevoda. Leningradskaia shkola [Great masters of literary translation. Leningrad school] (Petropolis, Saint Petersburg) focuses on the heritage of translators who lived and worked in Leningrad/ Saint Petersburg, including Iurii Levin, El’ga Linetskaia, Mikhail Donskoi, Georgii Ben, Tatiana Gnedich. 7 For more on the concept of translatability in the Soviet translation discourse see Baer 2016, 57–59. 8 Cf. Mikhail Iasnov’s comment: “in the Soviet era, translation became a free zone for expressing that which censorship would never allow in original verse” (Iasnov 2012, 21). 9 Linetskaia worked primarily as a translator from the French, but she also translated English, Spanish, and Latin American poetry. 10 See the recent anthology Dzhambul Dzhabaev: Prikliucheniia kazakhskogo akyna v sovetskoi strane [Dzhambul Dzhabaev: Adventures of a Kazakh bard in the Soviet country], ed. Konstantin Bogdanov et. al. (2013); also on this subject, see Holt 2015. 11 I am grateful to Sonia Ketchian for her help with the interlinear translation and phonetic transcription of the text. 12 Among Kalashnikova’s interlocutors are such famous translators as Anatolii Geleskul, Natalia Trauberg, Grigorii Kruzhkov, Natalia Avtonomova, Mark Belorusets, Marina Boroditskaia, Asar Eppel’, Grigorii Dashevskii, Anna Glazova, and many others. 13 Similarly, Anton Nesterov discusses resistance to innovative forms of contemporary American poetry as one of the most influential factors affecting the reception of American poetry in Soviet Union and Russia (Nesterov 2007). 14 According to Iurii Boldyrev’s note (Slutskii 1991, 1, 557), Slutskii planned to translate numerous Brecht poems for a volume in the Literaturnye pamiatniki [Literary monuments] series. This project was not realized; Slutskii’s translations of Brecht remain uncollected. There are conflicting opinions on

252  Katharine Hodgson Slutskii’s proficiency in German and the extent to which he relied on interlinear translations. Archival research is still needed to show how Slutskii went about translating Brecht, and whether he selected texts for translation himself. 15 For analysis of this poem in the context of Russian poets on translation, see Khotimsky (2016). Maria. 2016. “’Why did I sell my best years for somebody else’s words’: Soviet-era metaphors of translation in theory and in poetry.” Translation and Interpreting Studies 11:1: 4–22. 16 Translations into English are by the author (K.H.) unless otherwise stated. 17 Slutskii belongs to the tradition of Soviet-era translation as a site of intelligentsia resistance, described by Baer 2010, 149–167. 18 Slutskii was among the members of the Soviet Writers’ Union who publicly condemned Boris Pasternak’s decision to publish his novel Doctor Zhivago abroad, as part of the campaign to force Pasternak to refuse the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958. While Slutskii’s speech avoided the highly personal and vindictive attacks made by some of the other speakers, the part he played in the campaign was a lasting source of shame. His short contribution to the October 1958 meeting of the Writers’ Union at which Pasternak was condemned can be found in the transcript at http://antology.igrunov.ru/50-s/ esse/1084533076.html, accessed 27 January 2017. 19 By contrast, Andre Lefevere describes some of the compromises made by American translators of Brecht when transferring his play Mother Courage and Her Children to the value system of the USA (Lefevere 2004, 248–249). 20 On Brecht’s depiction of Stalin, see Hodgson 2000, 74–78. Slutskii’s poems on Stalin, “Bog” [God] (Slutskii 1991, 1, 170) and “Khoziain” [The boss] (1991, I, 171) circulated in manuscript before their publication in 1962. 21 This, in the GDR in 1951, was very far from being a compliment, as neither Proletkul′t nor Meierkhol′d had yet been rehabilitated as acceptable parts of the Soviet cultural legacy. Proletkul′t was founded in February 1917 to oversee the creation of a new proletarian culture, brought under state control in 1920 and disbanded in 1932. Theatre director Vsevolod Meierkhol′d, discredited for his “formalism,” was arrested in 1939 and was shot in prison the following year. 22 See Kleberg 2004, 231–232, for an account of Brecht’s contacts with Tret′iakov. His article discusses Brecht’s poem “Ist das Volk unfehlbar?” translated by Slutskii and discussed next. 23 Slutskii translated the poems and songs; E. Ionova and Iu. Iuzovskii translated the rest of the play. I would like to thank Josephine von Zitzewitz for alerting me to the shift of emphasis in Slutskii’s translation. 24 Translation by G. S. Smith. See also Slutskii’s “Pristal′nost′ pytlivuiu ne priacha” [Without concealing his searching look] (Slutskii 1991, I, 144). 25 I am extremely grateful to Susanna Witt for pointing out the Pasternak subtext here, and those that relate to Slutskii’s “Trudnosti perevoda,” discussed next. 26 See Pasternak, “Chudo” [A miracle] (one of the Zhivago poems): it describes a miracle that “catches you unawares [vrasplokh], in an instant” (Pasternak 1989–1992, III, 534). Also “Leitenant Shmidt” [Lieutenant Schmidt]: “Nad kreiserom vzvilsia signal: KOMANDUIU FLOTOM. SHMIDT. On vyrvalsia kak vzdokh So dna dushi riadna, I ne ego vina, Chto ne predostereg Svoikh, i ikh zastig vrasplokh, I rvetsia, v poiskakh epokh, V inye vremena . . .” [A signal went up over the cruiser: I COMMAND THE FLEET. SHMIDT. It broke out like a sigh from the depths of the canvas soul, and it was not his fault that he had not warned his own men, and caught them unawares, and

Translating the Other 253 was rushing, in search of epochs, into other times.] (Pasternak 1989–1992, I, 322). For more on the potentially revealing use of intertextual allusion in the work of Soviet translators, see Witt 2016. 27 Slutskii was not the first Soviet writer to draw such parallels: Evgenii Shvarts’s play Ten’ [The shadow], first staged in 1940, suggests connections between the Nazi and Soviet regimes; in Vasilii Grossman’s novel Zhizn′ i sud′ba [Life and Fate], the manuscript of which was seized by the authorities in 1961, characters comment directly on these connections. 28 See Gallagher 2009, 123; Baer 2010, 159. 29 Boldyrev’s note to “Perevozhu Brekhta” [I translate Brecht] (Slutskii 1991, II, 557).

References Baer, Brian James. 2010. “Literary Translation and the Construction of a Soviet Intelligentsia.” In Translation, Resistance, Activism, edited by Maria Tymoczko, 149–167. Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press. Billiani, Francesca. 2007. “Assessing Boundaries: Censorship and Translation, an Introduction.” In Modes of Censorship and Translation: National Contexts and Diverse Media, edited by Francesca Billiani, 1–25. Manchester: St Jerome. Bornemann, Ernest. 1957. “Ein Epitaph für Bertolt Brecht” [An Epitaph for Bertolt Brecht]. Special issue, Sinn und Form 9 (1, 2, 3): 142–158. Brecht, Bertolt. 1964. Der gute Mensch von Sezuan. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Brecht, Bertolt. 1981. Gedichte. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Brekht, Bertol’t [Brecht, Bertolt]. 1972. Stikhotvoreniia, rasskazy, p′esy [Poems, short stories, plays]. Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura. Available online: http://wysotsky.com/0009/037.htm Brodsky, Joseph. 1985. “Literature and War: A Symposium.” Times Literary Supplement (17 May): 11–12. Esslin, Martin. 1959. Brecht: A Choice of Evils. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode. Etkind, Efim. 1980. “Brecht and the Soviet Theater.” In Bertolt Brecht: Political Theory and Literary Practice, edited by Betty Nance Weber and Hubert Heinen, 81–87. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Gallagher, Aoife. 2009. “Pasternak’s ‘Hamlet’: Translation, Censorship and Indirect Communication.” In Translation and Censorship: Patterns of Communication and Interference, edited by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin and David Parris, 119–131. Dublin: Four Courts Press. Gentzler, Edwin. 1996. “Translation, Counter-Culture and ‘The Fifties’ in the USA.” In Translation, Power, Subversion, edited by Roman Alvarez and M. Carmen-Africa Vidal, 116–137. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Grossman, Vasilii. 1980. Zhizn′ i sud′ba [Life and Fate]. Lausanne: L’Age de l’Homme. Hodgson, Katharine. 2000. “The Soviet Union in the Svendborg Poems.” In Brecht’s Poetry of Political Exile, edited by Ronald Speirs, 66–85. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Khotimsky, Maria. 2016. “ ‘Why Did I Sell My Best Years for Somebody Else’s Words’: Soviet-era Metaphors of Translation in Theory and in Poetry.” Translation and Interpreting Studies 11 (1): 4–22.

254  Katharine Hodgson Kleberg, Lars. 2004. “Voprosy Brekhta” [Brecht’s questions]. Russian Literature LVI: 229–241. Lefevere, Andre. 2004. “Mother Courage’s Cucumbers: Text, System and Refraction in a Theory of Literature.” In The Translation Studies Reader, edited by Lawrence Venuti, 239–255. New York and London: Routledge. Lyon, James K. 1980. Bertolt Brecht in America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Ozerov, Lev. 2009. “Rezkaia liniia” [The sharp line]. In Boris Slutskii: vospominaniia sovremennikov [Boris Slutskii: Memories of Contemparies], compiled by Petr Gorelik, 327–346. St Petersburg: Zhurnal Neva. Pasternak, Boris. 1989–1992. Sobranie sochinenii [Collected works]. 5 Vols. Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura. Shvarts, Evgenii. 1940. “Ten′” [The shadow]. Literaturnyi sovremennik 3–62. Slutskii, Boris. 1977. “Trudnosti perevoda” [Difficulties of translation]. Zvezda 7: 114. Slutskii, Boris. 1991. Sobranie sochinenii [Collected works]. 3 Vols. Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura. Slutsky, Boris. 1999. Things That Happened. Edited and translated by G. S. Smith. Moscow and Birmingham: Glas Publishers. Witt, Susanna. 2016. “Translation and Intertextuality in the Soviet-Russian Context: The Case of Georgy Shengeli’s ‘Don Juan.’ ” Slavic and East European Journal 60 (1): 22–48. Zubok, Vladislav. 2009. Zhivago’s Children: The Last Russian Intelligentsia. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Part III

Late-Soviet and Post-Soviet Contexts

16 (Re)Translation, Ideology, and Business The Fate of Translated Adventure Fiction in Russia, Before and After 1991 Piet Van Poucke Introduction Within any literary system, some genres will occupy a peripheral position, which may result in literary translation as a “normal market response to insufficient or unsatisfactory domestic literary production” (Friedberg 1997, 2). This is the case with (Soviet) Russia, where some popular literary genres (science fiction, fantasy, detective stories, adventure fiction) remained underrated and underrepresented for a long time, despite their popularity among Russian readers, and so had to be imported from abroad. This chapter aims to provide more insight into how the (Soviet) Russian literary world dealt with the shortage of children’s literature and how the attitude toward translated, classic works of foreign adventure fiction evolved in the last decades of the twentieth century under the pressure of not only aesthetic but also ideological and economic constraints. This chapter will include a survey of Russian translations, retranslations, and re-editions of eight Western giants of adventure fiction in order to uncover traces of two important forces of patronage in Soviet and postSoviet-Russian culture: ideology and business. In order to assess the specificity or non-specificity of the Russian situation, the chapter will also include comparative data about the translation of the same authors into Dutch and Swedish.

Adventure Fiction According to the Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms (3rd edition, ODLT), adventure story is a “loose but commonly accepted term for a kind of prose narrative addressed for the most part to boys, in which a hero or group of heroes engages in exotic and perilous exploration.” Writing a history of adventure fiction (hereafter referred to as AF) actually means going back in time for ages, since most cultures started their (oral) literary tradition with (mythological) epic tales that contain many of the characteristics of AF. These same characteristics also apply to a large

258  Piet Van Poucke portion of the Western medieval literary tradition, in particular, to the chivalrous epics. However, from the nineteenth century onward, AF was considered to belong to the lower genres of literature, fit only for children and the masses, and hardly to be taken seriously by connoisseurs of highquality literature. Some cultures developed a rich AF tradition of their own, and AF assumed a relatively central position in their literary system (see EvenZohar 1990), but in most cultures it remained in a peripheral position, especially in those cases where AF had to be imported, as, for instance, in Russia. In 1849, the critic Aleksandr Druzhinin assessed translated AF in a rather negative way: “[n]owadays, translators prefer novels by Dumas and little tales by Dickens, which, with all their true merit, cannot raise the translator’s work in the opinion of the public nor make him proud of it” (Baer and Olshanskaya 2013, 53). But this did not stop the genre from being eagerly translated, and that is still the case today, as we will see next. The same applies to the Dutch and Swedish book markets, although recent evolutionary trends diverge in these two cultures. Up to now, 70% of all Dutch published works of prose were translations, most of which belong to the category of “popular and highly international genres such as thrillers, fantasy, detective stories, and science fiction” (Heilbron 2008, 190). In Sweden, the percentage of translated prose fiction also rose to “roughly 80 percent” (Wollin 2008, 1507) in the 1980s, but according to recent official data from the National Library of Sweden (2015) on the market for translated literature in Sweden, that number dropped to 55% in 2002 and even 36% in 2014, which is perhaps the result of the tremendous (international) success of Swedish authors working in the thriller and detective story genres.

Adventure Fiction in Russia (and the Former Soviet Union) In Russia and the Soviet Union, AF was for many decades relegated to a peripheral status, requiring AF to be imported from abroad, which in the end reinforced the peripheral status of the genre from the point of view of professional critics: Translation most often has compensated for the paucity and inferior quality of domestically produced literature. In Russia and East Central Europe, where native authors have produced comparatively few good books of adventure and travel, mystery novels, thrillers and light comedy for the theater, translation has traditionally filled this gap. (Friedberg 1997, 203) Despite the almost complete absence of a native Russian AF tradition in the nineteenth century, translations of the genre were popular, which

(Re)Translation, Ideology, and Business 259 persuaded one of the leading critics of the time, Vissarion Belinskii, to take the phenomenon seriously and to praise its value in the education of children, providing the novels contained only references to the real world and avoided fantastic stories (see Friedberg 1997, 205–206). Translated AF was so popular in Russia, not only in the nineteenth but also in the first decades of the twentieth century, that the 1920s saw the appearance of a series of pseudotranslations, a kind of a Russian answer to the tremendously popular Western adventure novels. Nikolai Bukharin coined the term “Red Pinkertonism” to describe this craze, referring to the popularity of the detective novel series featuring Nat Pinkerton (see Russell 1982; Dralyuk 2012)1 Bukharin then called for the creation of a “Communist Pinkerton,” “demonstrat[ing] an acute anxiety about the regime’s inability to enthuse and inspire young communists” (Dralyuk 2012, 5). The term “red” in this expression refers to the fact that detective heroes were replaced by workers in the pseudotranslations, as is the case, for instance, in one of the best examples of “Red Pinkertonism,” Marietta Shaginian’s Mess Mend (1923), written under the pseudonym of Jim Dollar. Other foreign-sounding pseudonyms of Russian authors in that period were George Delarme, Pierre Dumiel, René Cadou, and Reese Wilkie Lee (see Malikova 2010). Despite the closed nature of post-revolutionary Soviet cultural policy and the harsh ideological postulates for (translated) literature, the aim of the Soviet regime was clearly to make the masterpieces of world literature available to citizens of their new country, and to prove to the world “that the Russian proletariat were no barbarians” (see Bagno and Kazanskij 2011, 2082).2 From 1919 to 1924 the publishing house Vsemirnaia literatura [World literature] distributed translations from the canon of world literature, including works by Mark Twain and Jack London (Balliu 2005, 935). Those translations were not always thoroughly checked by the censors, a condition that lasted only a decade, as the process of censorship was quickly stabilized by the 1930s. From the 1930s onward, the translation of literary works was strongly affected by ideological constraints, but the import of foreign children’s and adventure fiction never dried up completely. In 1933, the Central Committee of the Communist Party even ordered the translation of a number of carefully vetted children’s books in massive editions, including the works of Jonathan Swift, Daniel Defoe and Jules Verne (OPSP 1972, 414). Later, in 1948, the series Literaturnye pamiatniki [Literary monuments] was created with the aim of publishing a large number of translated and untranslated literary works, including works by Poe and Melville, but none of the authors in my survey made it into that series. They were translated and published in separate editions, and only three of them were in the end considered important enough for mass distribution— Mark Twain, Jack London, and James Fenimore Cooper. They made it into the prestigious Biblioteka vsemirnoi literatury [Library of world

260  Piet Van Poucke literature] series, founded in 1967, which meant that a selection of their work was published in vast editions of between 300,000 and 303,000 copies. The translation policy toward foreign AF was significant for the relative tolerance that the Soviet regime exhibited regarding famous literary works from abroad (see Koreneva 2011, 2037), and this partly explains why so many talented writers in the Soviet Union did not participate in the creation of a socialist-realist literature, engaging instead in the process of literary translation. It is no coincidence that the Soviet Union was the country, in 1958—but also in the ensuing years—with the largest number of translated literary works in the world (Bagno and Kazanskij 2011, 2088). Witt (2011, 149, 154) even states that “[l]iterary translation in the Soviet Union may well be the largest more or less coherent project of translation the world has seen to date” and calls it an act of “culture planning.” In general, however, AF was available in the USSR in limited circulation and that gap was filled only in the 1980s with the promotion by Mikhail Gorbachev of the policies of glasnost and perestroika, when the last barriers to the importation of AF and other popular genres were finally lifted.

Corpus In this chapter, I will outline the recent translation trends, providing an overview of Russian translations, retranslations, and re-editions of eight famous Western AF authors. The selection of authors was mainly inspired by the following quote from the introduction to Maurice Friedberg’s Literary Translation in Russia. A Cultural History (1997): As I look back in time, I realize how many books of my Polish childhood were translations. [. . .] Huckleberry Finn was the first book I read all by myself. Then came Robert Louis Stevenson, James Fenimore Cooper, Jack London, and Jules Verne. I also read Karl May [. . .] and his contemporary Mayne Reid [. . .] (Friedberg 1997, 1) In order to study the translation policy in Russia in regard to AF, I decided to add to these seven writers (Mark Twain, of course, being the author of Huckleberry Finn) one more name, that of Alexandre Dumas (père), who is surprisingly absent in Friedberg’s list but is by far the most translated foreign author in Russia, according to the Index Translationum (www. unesco.org/xtrans/). The Index Translationum, the digital “World Bibliography of Translation,” UNESCO, will be the main source for my research, but as noted by Anthony Pym (2009, 269), the data on that website is highly dependent on the input by the member states of UNESCO, which may lead to “wild

(Re)Translation, Ideology, and Business 261 fluctuations” over the years. Nevertheless, the Index still is the only available large, online database for worldwide translations and, therefore, I will use the bibliographical data available there as a starting point. Complementary data, as far as possible, will be retrieved from library websites, online book shops and—for the Russian data—from the excellent website Laboratory of Fantastic Literature (http://fantlab.ru), which contains a large amount of data on translated and retranslated classics of AF, along with fantasy, science fiction, and other popular genres. As to the temporal boundaries of the research, I will limit myself to five consecutive five-year periods, ranging from 1981 to 2005. By not taking into account separate years, I avoid the aforementioned input problems with the Index, allowing me “to ride out the fluctuations” of the system (Pym 2009, 269) rather than looking at accidental increases or decreases in interest in one particular author in one particular year. Moreover, the periods involved are all demarcated by some key events in Russian (cultural) history, which is in line with the suggestion of Pym (1998, 44) to look at “translations immediately before and after each historical watershed” in order to reconstruct the more general processes of translation history. The first period (1981–1985) belongs to pure Soviet history, with its infamous censorship system and clear ideological restrictions on translation. The second period (1986–1990) is that of glasnost, with mitigated censorship, while the third (1991–1995) is marked by the transition to a market economy and the complete abolition of censorship. The last two periods (1996–2000 and 2001–2005) represent years of economic crisis and revival, respectively. A comparison of the first two periods with ideological restraints, on the one hand, and the latter three, with mainly economic constraints, should provide some indication of how strongly those constraints influenced the publishing practices related to AF. The survey will include quantitative data on translations of AF into three different languages and cultures. On the one hand, I will study translations made into Russian and, on the other hand, as a means of comparison, I will take two “minor” cultures that both belong to the Western world and, therefore, were untouched by the ideological constraints I expected to find in Russia in at least the first two periods of the survey. Since the original works in the survey were all written in English, French, or German, I decided to exclude these three languages altogether as target languages in the investigation, as they would give no translational data for some of the authors in the survey and so would disturb the overall picture and complicate any comparison. Finally, I also had to decide which translations to take into account for the investigation. In order to keep the quantitative analysis as straightforward as possible, I decided to confine the data to individual translated volumes of the eight aforementioned authors only, including volumes in collected works but excluding composite volumes of translations by several authors. I will make no distinction between first translations,

262  Piet Van Poucke retranslations, and re-editions since I am more interested in the edition of a translation as an indicator of its author’s popularity than in the considerations involved in the process that finally led to the retranslation of a literary work. When there are not only more (re)translations at a certain moment but also “more re-editions of previous translations, [this] might be considered a good index of public demand” (Pym 1998, 79). Pym goes on to state that “we have no convenient way of calculating how many translations went to how many people,” hence, the “frequency of re-editions can thus replace the missing information by giving a rough approximation of when there was a public demand” (Pym 1998, 79). In her volume on (re)translations of Flaubert and Sand into English, Sharon Deane-Cox underscores the importance of re-editions as they “reinforce” the “validity of that particular version” of a translation (2014, 12). I have to admit that in Soviet times, editors did not necessarily take economic factors like public demand into account as the main argument for re-edition, but I assume foreign AF was not translated “into the void” either, completely disregarding the actual preferences of the Russian public.

Retranslations and Re-Editions in Russia (1981–2005) Differences in Translation Policy across the Three Cultures The absolute figures on the number of editions of AF literature in Dutch, Swedish, and Russian are provided in Tables 16.1 to 16.3 in the appendix to this chapter. Figures 16.1 to 16.3 show the graphic trend in the ratio of (re)translations and re-editions of the authors in this survey in Dutch (Figure 16.1), Swedish (Figure 16.2) and Russian (Figure 16.3). 35 Dumas

30

Verne

25

London

20

Stevenson

15

Cooper

10

May

5

Reid Twain

0 1981–1985 1986–1990 1991–1995 1996–2000 2001–2005

Figure 16.1 Editions of Translated AF in Dutch between 1981 and 2005 (Trend Lines)

(Re)Translation, Ideology, and Business 263 18 16

Dumas

14

Verne

12

London

10

Stevenson

8

Cooper

6

May

4

Reid

2

Twain

0 1981–1985 1986–1990 1991–1995 1996–2000 2001–2005

Figure 16.2 Editions of Translated AF in Swedish between 1981 and 2005 (Trend Lines) 200 180 160 140 120 100 80 60 40 20 0

Dumas Verne London Stevenson Cooper May Reid Twain 1981–1985 1986–1990 1991–1995 1996–2000 2001–2005

Figure 16.3 Editions of Translated AF in Russian between 1981 and 2005 (Trend Lines)

The scale for Figure 3 has been adapted to the circumstances because the huge number of editions of Dumas’ prose (548 in the period 1991–1995) would reduce the curves for the other authors to almost horizontal lines and, hence, suppress the visibility of the trend lines in their translations. The more or less chaotic and mostly unpredictable trend lines of Figures 16.1 and 16.2 seem to be representative of normal (Western) market strategies, where the decrease in the availability of translations of one author is offset by other translations, and the popularity of writers is constantly changing, except for some specific cases, to which I will return later in this chapter. The fact that Figure 16.3 shows a completely different and much more systemic picture is an indication that structures, other than purely market ones, were at work in Russia, both before and after 1991.

264  Piet Van Poucke As we can conclude from the quantitative data on re-editions of translated AF, Cooper and Stevenson share a similar fate in all three cultures. There is a constant but somehow limited flow of translations that continues throughout the five periods under examination. The same goes for Twain. He made it into the Top-3 in Dutch and Swedish, thanks to his relative popularity in the 1980s, but that popularity faded away from the 1990s onward. In the following discussion, I will not go into detail about those three authors but will focus instead on the five others who are prominently present or absent in at least one of the three cultures, which allows me to draw some partial assumptions regarding translation practices related to AF in the three cultures. Alexandre Dumas (père)—“All-Time Favorite” in Russia Only in pre-glasnost times was Alexandre Dumas (1802–1870) surpassed by another author, Verne, in terms of the number of Russian editions, but from 1986 on the former undisputedly took the lead in the statistics, which stands in sharp contrast to his popularity in Dutch and Swedish translation. As a matter of fact, Dumas was popular in Russia from the very beginning of his career. The first Russian translation dates back to 1829 (the drama Henri III et sa cour [Henry III and his court]). It was already translated into Russian just a few months after its publication in Paris—(see Durylin 1937, 491). For a certain period, he was one of the few authors that seemed to be constantly (re)translated, as noted by the critic Nikolai Dobroliubov in 1857: Since the beginning of the fourth decade of this century [. . .] translation activity has been declining [. . .], having been reduced almost exclusively to translations of French vaudevilles and the novels of Paul de Kock, Alexandre Dumas, and Paul Féval. (Baer and Olshanskaya 2013, 63) As early as 1912–1913 the complete collection of Dumas’ novels was published in Russian in 24 volumes. A look at how his work was discussed in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia in 1972 gives us an impression of the official position taken by the Soviet regime regarding the acceptability of Dumas’ works. He is praised for the affinity he showed toward Russia in the account he made of his journey through Russia in 1858 (En Russie: Impressions de voyage [In Russia: Travel impressions], 1860), which was in sharp contrast to the way Marquis de Custine treated the country in his highly critical La Russie en 1839 [Russia in 1839] (1843), a travel account that was ultimately banned in Russia (see Sigrist 1990) and was published in Russian translation without cuts only in 1996. Dumas also earned the Encyclopedia's

(Re)Translation, Ideology, and Business 265 praise for the “exciting, rapidly unfolding action, the cheerfulness and his active attitude to life” in his other works. The fact that his heroes are “full of energy, courage and inventiveness,” and “overcome all kinds of obstacles,” turned them into prototypes of the heroes of socialist realism, making Dumas harmless, as it were, for Soviet children (Narkevich 1972, VIII, 572–573). The timeless and politically neutral character of his works explains why he was popular in Russia both before and after the events of 1991. Despite the sharp decline in editions since the period 1996–2000, most probably due to the appearance of new and strong rivals (see the following), he remained the most popular author in the survey at least until 2005, and this can only be explained by the mix of the a-political and the adventurous in his works, and his highly appreciated literary style, which made his novels appealing for readers of different ages and literary preferences. In the period of 1991–1995, for instance, Le comte de Monte-Cristo [The Count of Monte-Cristo] was published 39 times in Russian, while Les trois mousquetaires [The three musketeers] had no fewer than 49 editions. Jules Verne—The Most Universal Author The only author who can compete with Dumas’ glory and fame in Russia during the years of my survey is Jules Verne (1828–1905). The fact that he shared first/second place overall in all three cultures of the survey confirms the universal character of his literary works, which were, apparently, highly appreciated on both sides of the ideological divide. This is a direct consequence of the a-political character of his oeuvre, which is, not without reason, considered as the starting point for the genre of AF, while Verne himself is referred to as its “most influential master” (ODLT 2008). The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (Narkevich 1971, IV, 536) confirms the politically neutral nature of Verne’s literature, as his works receive only praise. The encyclopedia explicitly mentions that Verne was “a democrat and a republican,” who was “linked with utopian socialists and the activists of the Paris Commune of 1871.” This statement proves that he was more than politically suited for translation into Russian and for reading by the citizens of the Soviet Union. Long before the Encyclopedia gave this positive assessment, Verne had attracted the attention of Russian translators. His first novel Cinq semaines en ballon [Five weeks in a balloon] was translated into Russian one year after the publication of the French original (1864), and five years before that work was recognized and translated into English (1869). Great writers such as Turgenev, Tolstoy, and later Gorky lauded the French author in their writings. Indeed, nearly everything Verne wrote was immediately translated into Russian,

266  Piet Van Poucke thanks in part to the enthusiasm of the Ukrainian writer Mariia Vilinskaia, who published 16 translations of Verne between 1867 and 1877, under the pseudonym of Marko Vovchok (see Brandis 1957; Waddington 1977, 337). The popularity of Verne’s works remained undisputed both in Czarist Russia and in the Soviet Union. As Brandis (1957) notes, it was even recommended in 1933 in a resolution of the Central Committee of the Communist Party that he be one of only three foreign authors of children’s literature to be published first, along with Defoe and Swift. One novel by Verne, however, was remarkably absent in the Soviet era: Michel Strogoff (known as Michael Strogoff: The Courier of the Czar in English). Despite the fact that this completely fictitious and implausible account of a journey from Moscow to Irkutsk became one of his most popular works in the West, the novel was translated into Russian only twice before 1991, notably in 1900 and 1906, before the Revolution and a quarter of a century after the publication of the French original. This was the result of a long struggle with the Czarist censors, who requested that the translations be heavily abridged (the 1900 version had only half the number of pages as the original). Moreover, some facts in the novel were completely changed. The Russian reader had to wait until 1992 before Strogoff’s adventures could be read in a complete translation, at a time when all Verne’s works were experiencing a strong revival. As can be seen in Figure 16.3, Verne was (re)translated and re-edited no fewer than 133 times in Russia in the period 1991–1995, but this temporary popularity— curiously enough, the popularity of Verne showed a similar rise in Dutch and Swedish in the same period—dropped off in the subsequent five years, in parallel with the other AF writers (see further down). Jack London—The Socialist In contrast to the first two AF authors, Jack London, pseudonym for John Griffith Chaney (1876–1916), can hardly be regarded as politically neutral. Along with Cooper and Reid, London is one of a group of authors who “continue[d] to be far more widely read in Russia and East Central Europe than in their homelands” (Friedberg 1997, 202). Whereas London is, indeed, read in most US schools, his leftist politics are not discussed there, hence, he is mainly appreciated for the thrilling nature of his novels. The fact that he joined the Socialist Labor Party in 1896 and adhered to “socialist” ideas throughout his literary work raised interest in both his person and his literary work in socialist countries. Consequently, London’s fiction was regarded as fully acceptable by the Soviet censors, and this is also reflected in the fact that his novels were published in Russian over and over, with several editions during the 1950s and 1970s. The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (Badanova 1974, XV, 13–14) highly recommended London for his “condemnation of

(Re)Translation, Ideology, and Business 267 individualism and the Nietzschean philosophy of the superman,” and for his “criticism against the expansionist politics of American imperialism” and “against financial and industrial kings.” However, he was also criticized in the Encyclopedia for cultivating the “law of the jungle,” and paying more attention to the strength of nature than to the achievements of technical progress, but that, apparently, did not stop the continuing wave of (re)translations and re-editions of his work. Even nowadays, when ideology is no longer an argument on Russia’s book market, London’s bestsellers, including The Sea Wolf, Martin Eden and White Fang, are published in Russian year after year, which proves he deserves a place in the Russian canon, beyond any narrow conception of politics or ideology. In the case of London’s fiction, ideology and market processes seem more intertwined than with other authors. His huge popularity in the Soviet Union can probably be explained by two separate characteristics of his work: the social (or socialist) criticism of American society, and the broad attention he paid to the portraits of wild nature both helped to spread his fame in Russia. The ideological aspect of this double trump card is less pertinent to both Swedish and Dutch cultures, but that doesn’t mean he was any less popular, at least in Sweden: The combination of adventure, nature, primitivism, and socialism in London’s works evidently had a special appeal for Swedish readers. Statistics of library loans from the public libraries show that his books were borrowed more often than those of any other writer, Swedish or foreign. (Lundén 1998, 137) As a matter of fact, there is no reason why Dutch children should not appreciate the portraits of American nature they could find in London’s novels, but he was hardly translated and promoted, at least in comparison with his biggest rival, Karl May (see further down), who nearly monopolized the market for American adventure fiction in the Netherlands and Belgium. However, it is not easy to find a clear answer to the question of why there was such a big difference in popularity between these two writers (10 Dutch translations of London in my survey versus 63 Dutch editions of May, see Figures 16.1 and 16.2). I can only assume that the church (Catholic in Belgium, Protestant in the Netherlands) played its role in downplaying the significance of London. He could have been unwanted for various reasons, including his overt “socialist” ideas, his undisciplined biography and a number of sensitive themes in his works (suicide, violence), but further research should clarify to what extent the distribution and promotion of London’s novels was actually constrained and hindered by mediation of the church. In any case, the “Christian” author May enjoyed much greater popularity.

268  Piet Van Poucke Reid and May—Strictly Local Heroes Finally, two other authors in the survey deserve a separate discussion because they are hugely popular in one culture while virtually unknown in the other two—Thomas Mayne Reid and Karl May. The Scots-IrishAmerican novelist Thomas Mayne Reid (1818–1883), author of seventyfive AF novels, was named by Friedberg in his list of authors who are better known in Russian than in their own country (see the earlier discussion), and this could well have been the result of the topics the writer selected for his adventure novels. There is an obvious direct link between his literary work and the praise he received in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia (Bel’skii 1975, XXII, 89) for depicting “the resistance put up by Mexican rebels against the American invasion,” “the horrors of the slave trade in the US,” and “the struggle of the Indians against the white colonizers.” His popularity in Russia, however, goes far beyond ideological marketing, which is illustrated by the fact that he figures in a short story by Anton Chekhov in 1887, “Mal’chiki,” in which a boy asks a girl: “Vy chitali Main-Rida?” [Have you read Mayne Reid?] (Chekhov 1985, 424). Even after the break-up of the USSR and the abolition of censorship, he was the second most published AF author in the survey, with 137 editions in 1991–1995, second only to Dumas. Still, this is probably a result of local tradition and educational practices, because Reid can hardly be called a universal AF hero. During the 25 years of my survey Reid was translated neither into Dutch nor into Swedish. And a quick look at the website of the central library of my home town, Ghent, indicates that only one (!) novel by Reid is available at the moment, The Boy Slaves, not even in translation, but in the original English version. There isn’t even a Wikipedia page devoted to the writer in Dutch, while the Swedish one (as of November 2015) contains only six lines. The contrast with the elaborate Russian Wikipedia page on Reid is therefore striking. It would be interesting to probe the reasons behind his tremendous popularity in Russia (proof of which is the appearance, in 2012, of a Russian biography of Reid in the prestigious Zhizn’ zamechatel’nykh liudei [The life of remarkable people] series (Tanaseichuk 2012) compared to his almost complete obscurity in Dutch and Swedish cultures. Quite the opposite is the case with German author Carl Friedrich May (1842–1912), better known as Karl May, whose literary works experienced a turbulent fate in Russia. May was an immediate hit in Russia, where his first novels about the Far West were translated between 1891 and 1910. Later, however, his fame faded, but there were plans during the 1930s, as a result of the “rapprochement” between Germany and the USSR, to publish the collected works of May in Russian translation (see Sharyi 2010). Those plans, however, were thwarted by the German invasion of 1941, and afterward May disappeared without a trace from

(Re)Translation, Ideology, and Business 269 Russian bookshops for a number of reasons. First, Adolf Hitler admired him, which made him completely unacceptable in the Soviet Union after the war, and second, his novels contain serious religious undertones that were equally undesirable for the Soviet censors. The latter problem could easily be dealt with, as Pokorn (2012, 82–94) demonstrates in her discussion of Slovene (and censored) translations of the novel Winnetou, but the former “defect” was clearly insurmountable in the USSR, and his books were not published in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) either. Winnetou was, however, well known in the West and East of Germany, which led GDR cultural policy-makers to look for a kind of surrogate. While the West enjoyed a series of Winnetou-based movies between 1962 and 1968, the East found an alternative in a series of “Red Westerns,” or “Osterns,” produced by the GDR state-owned film studio DEFA, in which the American army evidently played the role of the bad guys.3 The unacceptability of May’s works in the USSR was so strong that he shared the infamous fate of Bukharin and was not even mentioned in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia of the 1970s. The glasnost’ years in my survey (1986–1990) showed no sign of rehabilitation for May. According to the data, his works had to wait until the 1990s before they were retranslated into Russian and presented to the Russian public. There was, however, no real tradition of reading May, and so no new editions followed in 2001–2005, a situation that continued until 2009. For some reason (perhaps the religious undertones of his work), May’s novels were much more appreciated in Dutch culture, where he was by far the most popular translated AF author, at least until 1996 (see Figure 16.1), but not in Swedish (see Figure 16.2), where his complete works were translated by the 1970s but, apparently, have not been republished since. Market Trends Since 1996 Once the initial enthusiasm over ideological freedom in Russia was over, we see a clear and rapid decline in the number of editions of translated AF, at least for the eight authors in the survey. Several hypotheses can be put forward to explain the significant fall of Dumas and his colleagues since 1996. First, the Russian public was clearly saturated with AF works after the initial ecstatic response to the abolition of censorship, which may explain why the rediscovery of the “forbidden fruit” of Karl May lasted so briefly in Russia. May wasn’t really read in Russia before the glasnost’ period, and the abolishment of ideological constraints on publishing practices could do little to alter that fact. However, ideological freedom is not the only factor at work here. Two other—economic—factors for the fall in popularity of AF should be mentioned: Russia went through a severe economic crisis in 1998 from which it recovered only very slowly, which could explain why even Dumas was published only 22 times (17 books of which were volumes in a series of

270  Piet Van Poucke collected works, that obviously were planned long before the outbreak of the crisis). Furthermore, there is probably a more global explanation for the fall in editions, since the numbers of published AF are decreasing in Dutch and Swedish as well. As indicated by Pokorn (2012, 83), “[t]oday, Karl May’s books are in decline, they can still be found in all public libraries, although it is obvious that in the last decade they were ousted from the throne of popularity by Harry Potter and vampire adventures.” This statement is made in connection with translations of Karl May in Slovenia, but it holds true for other AF authors and cultures as well. The first novel of the Harry Potter series appeared in 1997 and was translated into Russian in 2000, which was the start of a real success story. In his report on publishing policies in Russia in the 1990s, Arnold (2002, 6) indicates how the first edition of volume 4 of the Harry Potter series (2002) sold no fewer than 1,200,000 copies in Russia. This is a remarkable figure, even for Russia, since hardly 0.6% of all published books in Russian in 2001 had a print run of more than 100,000 copies (Arnold 2002, 7). It is important to emphasize here that this data relates to book editions only: One has to bear in mind, discussing the contemporary fate of AF in Russia, that books are nowadays heavily challenged by another competitor of overwhelming force—the screen adaptations of many of the aforementioned AF rivals, Harry Potter (eight movies between 2001 and 2011), The Lord of the Rings (three movies between 2001 and 2003), and The Twilight Saga (five movies between 2008 and 2012), to name but a few. Further research is needed to illustrate the influence of these movies on the Russian AF book market. In this regard, the Russian book market follows global tendencies and market rules: worldwide bestsellers are dominantly present on the web pages of Internet bookshops like OZON.ru (www.ozon.ru/), but the eight authors of the survey are equally there, each of them represented by recent editions. This means that the traditions persist, but the extremes of Figure 16.3 have long disappeared and are unlikely ever to return.

Conclusions Even if absolute figures on the number of copies actually sold are lacking and the data in this survey does not take into account the relative scale of Russian (155 million potential readers), Dutch (21 million), and Swedish (9 million) cultures, the general tendencies in publishing practices are clearly distinguishable, which makes a comparison not only feasible but also useful. Russia has a long tradition of translation of AF, mainly intended to fill the gap in its own AF production. The genre was long considered to be second-rate but was very popular among Russian readers. Even in Soviet times there was a constant flow of translations of AF, and some authors even made it into the Biblioteka vsemirnoi literatury [Library of world

(Re)Translation, Ideology, and Business 271 literature] series. A real boom in editions of the genre, however, took place only after the mitigation, and later abolition, of censorship, when Dumas and his colleagues were issued over and over during a ten-year period. Their popularity was atypical, which is very obvious when the data for Russia is compared with that for the Dutch and Swedish editions. After the first wave of enthusiasm, however, the popularity of these classic AF authors diminished and, today, figures for Russia are trending roughly in the same way as for other book markets. As for the role of ideology in the translated AF market in Russia, we can quite confidently state that it must have played a role before 1985, as some of the authors in the survey were artificially promoted or repressed based on non-artistic considerations. But even after the abolition of censorship we see how the same authors keep emerging in Russia, which confirms that once a canon has been established in a culture, it tends to continue to exist across political and social ruptures. May, for instance, did not belong to the traditional AF canon in Russia and failed to become part of it following the lifting of censorship restrictions on the Russian book market. On the other hand, Dumas was, and still is, the most popular author in this survey, at least until 2005.

Notes 1 Russell (1982, 391, with a reference to E. Quayle, The Collector’s Book of Detective Fiction, London, 1972, 56) describes how the literary hero Nat Pinkerton actually came into being: “In the 1870s Allan Pinkerton (1819–84), founder of the famous detective agency that bears his name, ‘conceived the idea of a series of detective tales based on the factual backgrounds of his more sensational cases,’ and soon he and his son Frank were churning out story after story of crime and detection in the United States.” 2 All translations from German and Russian in this chapter are mine, unless otherwise indicated. 3 A noteworthy detail regarding this ‘battle of the Westerns’ is that the Winnetoufilms were usually shot in Croatia, while the star of the Osterns was Serbianborn Gojko Mitić (Sharyi 2010).

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272  Piet Van Poucke its role in Russia’s international position-finding and the Russian appropriation of world culture]. In Übersetzung: Translation: Traduction: Ein internationales Handbuch zur Übersetzungsforschung: An International Encyclopedia of Translation Studies: Encyclopédie internationale de la recherche sur la traduction : 3. Teilband, edited by Harald Kittel, Armin Paul Frank, Norbert Greiner, Theo Hermans, Werner Koller, José Lambert, and Fritz Paul, in association with Juliane House and Brigitte Schultze, 2082–2090. Berlin and Boston: Walter de Gruyter. Balliu, Christian. 2005. “Clefs pour une histoire de la traductologie soviétique” [Keys to a history of Soviet translation studies]. Meta: journal des traducteurs/ Meta: Translators’ Journal 50 (3): 934–948. Bel’skii, Aleksandr A. 1975. “Rid” [Reid]. In Bol’shaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia [Great Soviet Encyclopedia]. 3rd Edition, XXII, 89. Moscow: Sovetskaia Entsiklopediia. Brandis, Evgenii. 1957. “Zhiul’ Vern v Rossii” [Jules Verne in Russia]. In Vern, Zhiul’. Sobranie sochinenii v dvenadtsati tomakh, edited by B. N. Agapov, Iu. I. Danilin, and D. I. Shcherbakov, 670–678. Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura. Chekhov, Anton Pavlovich. 1985. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v tridtsati tomakh : Tom 6 [Complete collected works and letters in thirty volumes: Volume 6]. Moscow: Nauka. Deane-Cox, Sharon. 2014. Retranslation: Translation, Literature and Reinterpretation. London, New Delhi, New York and Sydney: Bloomsbury. Dralyuk, Boris. 2012. Western Crime Fiction Goes East: The Russian Pinkerton Craze 1907–1934. Leiden and Boston: Brill. Durylin, Sergei. 1937. “Aleksandr Diuma-otets i Rossiia” [Alexandre Dumas, père, and Russia]. Literaturnoe nasledstvo 27–28: 491–562. Even-Zohar, Itamar. 1990. “Polysystem Studies.” Poetics Today 11: 1. Friedberg, Maurice. 1997. Literary Translation in Russia: A Cultural History. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Heilbron, Johan. 2008. “Responding to Globalization: The Development of Book Translations in France and the Netherlands.” In Beyond Descriptive Translation Studies: Investigations in Homage to Gideon Toury, edited by Anthony Pym, Miriam Shlesinger and Daniel Simeoni, 187–197. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Koreneva, Marina. 2011. “Die Geschichte der russischen Übersetzungsliteratur und die Entwicklung der russischen Literatursprache” [The history of translation into Russian and the evolution of Russian as a literary language]. In Übersetzung: Translation: Traduction: Ein internationales Handbuch zur Übersetzungsforschung: An International Encyclopedia of Translation Studies: Encyclopédie internationale de la recherche sur la traduction: 3: Teilband, edited by Harald Kittel, Armin Paul Frank, Norbert Greiner, Theo Hermans, Werner Koller, José Lambert, and Fritz Paul, in association with Juliane House, and Brigitte Schultze, 2023–2041. Berlin and Boston: Walter de Gruyter. Lundén, Rolf. 1998. “American Literature in Translation.” In Images of America in Scandinavia: Internationale Forschungen Zur Allgemeinen Und Vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft, edited by Poul Houe and Sven Hakon Rossel, 128–144. Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi.

(Re)Translation, Ideology, and Business 273 Malikova, Mariia. 2010. “Khalturovedenie: sovetskii psevdoperevodnoi roman perioda NEPa” [Khalturovedenie: Soviet pseudotranslated novels of the NEP period]. NLO 103. Available online: http://magazines.russ.ru/nlo/2010/103/ mm7.html Narkevich, Aleksandr Iu. 1971. “Vern” [Verne]. In Bol’shaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia [Great Soviet Encyclopedia]. 3rd edition, IV, 536. Moscow: Sovetskaia Entsiklopediia. Narkevich, Aleksandr Iu. 1972. “Diuma” [Dumas]. In Bol’shaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia [Great Soviet Encyclopedia]. 3rd edition, VIII, 572–573. Moscow: Sovetskaia Entsiklopediia. National Library of Sweden. 2015. “Statistik över svensk bokutgivning” [Statistics of Swedish Publishing]. Statistics for 2002 available online: www.kb.se/ Dokument/Soka/statistik2002.pdf, and for 2014, available online: www.kb.se/ dokument/Samlingarna/bibliografier/I%20Nationalbibliografin%20redov isad%20utgivning%202014.pdf ODLT = Baldick, Chris. 2008. The Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. 3rd Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Available online: www.oxfordrefer ence.com/ OPSP. 1972. O partiinoi i sovetskoi pechati, radioveshchanii i televidenii: Sbornik dokumentov i materialov [On party and Soviet press, radio and television: Documents and materials]. Moscow: Mysl’. Available online: http://elar.urfu. ru/bitstream/10995/96/1/958172.pdf Pokorn, Nike. 2012. Post-Socialist Translation Practices: Ideological Struggle in Children’s Literature. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Pym, Anthony. 1998. Method in Translation History. Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing. Pym = Poupaud, Sandra, Anthony Pym, and Ester Torres Simón. 2009. “Finding Translations: On the Use of Bibliographical Databases in Translation History.” Meta 54 (2): 264–278. Russell, Robert. 1982. “Red Pinkertonism: An Aspect of Soviet Literature of the 1920s.” Slavonic and East European Review 60 (3): 390–412. Sharyi, Andrei. 2010. “My kak geroi, geroi kak my: Opyt vozvrashcheniia v nesovetskoe detstvo” [We as heroes, heroes like Us: An attempt at returning to a non-Soviet childhood]. Inostrannaia literatura 2010 (6). Available online: http://magazines.russ.ru/inostran/2010/6/sh5.html Sigrist, Christian. 1990. Das Russlandbild des Marquis de Custine: von der Civilisationskritik zur Russlandfeindlichkeit [Marquis de Custine’s Russia image: From development criticism to hostility against Russia]. Frankfurt am Main, Bern, New York and Paris: Peter Lang. Tanaseichuk, Andrei. 2012. Main Rid: zhil otvazhnyi kapitan [Mayne Reid: There was a brave captain]. Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia. Waddington, Patrick. 1977. “Some New Light on Turgenev’s Relations with His French Publisher, Pierre-Jules Hetzel.” Slavonic and East European Review 55 (3): 328–347. Witt, Susanna. 2011. “Between the Lines: Totalitarianism and Translation in the USSR.” In Contexts, Subtexts and Pretexts: Literary Translation in Eastern Europe and Russia, edited by Brian James Baer, 149–170. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

274  Piet Van Poucke Wollin, Lars. 2008. “The Language of Nineteenth and Twentiethth Century Translations I: Swedish.” In The Nordic Languages: An International Handbook of the History of the North Germanic Languages: Volume 2, edited by Oskar Bandle, Kurt Braunmüller, Ernst Håkon Jahr, Allan Karker, Hans-Peter Naumann, and Ulf Teleman, 1506–1512. Berlin and New York: Walter De Gruyter.

Appendix

Table 16.1 Editions of Translated AF in Dutch between 1981 and 2005 (Absolute Figures) Dutch

Dumas Verne London Stevenson Cooper Reid Twain May

1981–1985 2 1986–1990 1 1991–1995 4 1996–2000 9 2001–2005 8 SUM 24

31 2 14 7 7 61

3 1 1 5 0 10

8 3 3 3 2 19

2 1 2 1 0 6

0 0 0 0 0 0

11 1 8 5 5 30

26 13 23 0 1 63

Table 16.2 Editions of Translated AF in Swedish between 1981 and 2005 (Absolute Figures) Swedish

Dumas Verne London Stevenson Cooper Reid Twain May

1981–1985 5 1986–1990 6 1991–1995 8 1996–2000 3 2001–2005 5 SUM 27

12 10 15 3 8 48

16 7 15 3 7 48

6 12 3 5 3 29

5 3 1 0 2 11

0 0 0 0 0 0

10 6 9 2 5 32

0 0 0 0 0 0

Table 16.3 Editions of Translated AF in Russian between 1981 and 2005 (Absolute Figures) Russian

Dumas Verne London Stevenson Cooper Reid Twain May

1981–1985 39 1986–1990 89 1991–1995 548 1996–2000 56 2001–2005 27 SUM 759

61 48 133 18 16 276

46 36 90 17 21 210

21 20 59 8 10 118

40 23 91 3 17 174

12 31 137 9 5 194

44 29 64 9 23 169

0 0 36 5 0 41

17 “Adieu, Remember Me” The Hamlet Canon in Post-Soviet Russia Aleksei Semenenko

Canon, Translation, and Text Memory How would you translate a text that has already been translated about thirty times in your culture? How would you treat its canonical status in your new translation? What strategy would you choose to compete with the classic translation? How do you deal with the great burden of commentaries, interpretations, and adaptations of the text? These are just few questions that any translator or commentator is inevitably confronted with when facing Hamlet. Hamlet became an organic part of Russian culture more than 250 years ago. The first Russian Hamlets were only remotely related to the English original. Aleksandr Sumarokov, for example, created his own version of Hamlet in 1748 and most likely based it, apart from the original text, on Pierre Antoine de La Place’s abridged account of Shakespeare’s play. Stepan Viskovatov’s adaptation in 1811 was based on Jean-François Ducis’ Hamlet (1769), which in its turn was a sort of “spin-off” of the English original (for a detailed history of Hamlet in Russia, see Semenenko 2007). Since then, there have appeared at least 29 full translations from the original, not counting numerous texts in various ways connected to the play. Gideon Toury (1981, 1995) made the point of insisting that the discussion of translation is impossible without taking into account the specifics of the target culture. However, the situation becomes even more complicated when we discuss “foreign” texts that become a part of the national canon. It creates an essential paradox: on the one hand, they are fully integrated into the recipient culture, but on the other, the discussion of their perceived adequacy vis-à-vis the original is periodically revitalized. Apart from that, any new translation inexorably appears as a counteragent to the previous canon; it is diachronically related to the previous tradition and synchronically to the current literary situation. Translators can thus never be perceived outside of the current cultural field and have to develop their own strategies of competition with the previous canon, which often means that the translator has to address many factors above and beyond the translation proper.

“Adieu, Remember Me” 277 In other words, every translator has to deal with the unique “meaningspace” of Hamlet in Russian culture, the text’s memory (Lotman 1990, 18). This encompasses a whole repertoire of contexts, paratexts, and discourses that have become an integral part of the cultural memory, which, as defined by Iurii Lotman, not only preserves texts but also constantly recycles them, producing new meanings (Lotman 1992; see also Lotman 1979; Lotman and Uspensky 1978; Lotman and Uspensky 1985, 65). This paradox constitutes the dynamic development of any culture and is as important for translations as it is for original texts. Translated texts that have acquired canonical status thus function as a reflection of the translation practices of a given period but also provide a “window” on current cultural processes in general. This chapter will thus focus on the meaning-space of Hamlet in Russian culture during the first two postSoviet decades, taking into account not only translations but also other texts related to Hamlet.

Translating after Pasternak The Soviet era produced two canonical translations of Hamlet—one by Mikhail Lozinskii (1933) and the other by Boris Pasternak (1940). In 1937, Anna Radlova presented her translation but it provoked a negative reaction from the critics (Radlova 1937). Radlova’s life ended in tragic death in a labor camp in 1949, and her name was practically erased from Soviet literature. Lozinskii’s version was considered to be more “academic” and more suitable for academic editions of Shakespeare, and therefore dominated in print, whereas Pasternak’s version was mainly used in the theater, school editions, and in the renowned film version from 1964 by Grigorii Kozintsev (Semenenko 2007, 98–100, 129–139).1 In 1954, a prose translation by the Soviet Shakespeare scholar Mikhail Morozov was published posthumously, but it was known only to academics and so did not challenge the duumvirate of Lozinskii and Pasternak. Drastic political changes usually speed up cultural processes, rendering the texts of the previous period obsolete. The decades following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 are a spectacular example of this process, delivering 12 new translations of Hamlet, which are competing not only with each other, but also—and primarily—with the previous canon (see Table 17.1).2 One of the factors which stimulated this explosion of translations was the increasing accessibility of the Internet that made possible the free self-publishing, unrestricted by editors and censors, which challenged the elitist modes of publishing and allowed for more “democratic” approaches to the translation and interpretation of canonical texts. The following is a short overview of the main features of these translations (for a fuller account of most of them see Semenenko 2011) which essentially boil down to three common tendencies in the retranslation of canonical texts: (1) to modernize, to liven up Shakespeare with modern

278  Aleksei Semenenko Table 17.1 Russian Hamlets of the Post-Soviet Period (before 2013) N

First published

Translator

Notes

18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

1991 1999 2001 2001 2002 2003 2007 2007 2008 2009 2010 2013

Iurii Livshits Vitalii Rapoport Vitalii Poplavskii Nadezhda Korshunova Andrei Chernov Igor’ Peshkov Aleksei Tsvetkov Andrei Pustogarov Sergei Stepanov Anatolii Agroskin Valerii Anan’in Aleksandr Baranov

On the Internet On the Internet

On the Internet Internet, after Morozov Internet, “Bad” Quarto

vocabulary and even slang; (2) to correct the previous translations; and (3) to provide new interpretations of the text. These tendencies usually lead to the following features of new translations, characteristic both for the end of the nineteenth century and the current period: • • • • •

“accuracy” that leads to unreadability interpretation articulated in paratexts modernization, sometimes to the point of parody normalization of the canonized compilationism (translating “by bits” and the use of previous translations)

The first post-Soviet Hamlet was made by the writer and translator Iurii Livshits (1991). His version, however, escaped the notice of the general public because it was made for the Youth Theater in Cheliabinsk and only later appeared on the Internet. Livshits’s Hamlet is characterized by modern vocabulary, and so is easy to read and to enunciate. Moreover, the translator does not hesitate to paraphrase the text whenever he sees fit, and to use colloquial expressions for greater effect. The beginning of the “To be or not to be” soliloquy3 is a good example: Vopros voprosov: byt’ ili ne byt’? Chto blagorodnei—slavit’ providen’e I podstavliat’ ego udaram grud’ Il’ boi priniat’: shagnut’ vo vseoruzh’e V puchinu zla?

[The question of all questions: to be or not to be? What is nobler: to glorify Providence And to lay open one’s chest to its hits Or to accept the battle: to step, fully armed, Into the abyss of evil?]4

“Adieu, Remember Me” 279 The next in line was Vitalii Rapoport (1999) who attempted to present a version closer to the original. In reality, however, his translation is characterized primarily by literal translation, “translationese,” and an abundance of simplifying additions and substitutions. His poetic skills are generally not very impressive, which is especially noticeable in his rhymed verses, hence the use of ready-made expressions from previous translations, especially Pasternak’s. In summary, the translation is an amateur attempt without any consistent strategy or method. The translation can hardly be called accurate in whatever sense, and it has passed almost unnoticed in Russia. Another contender was the theater director Vitalii Poplavskii (2001) who emphasized his goal to present a modern, updated version of Hamlet. Poplavskii’s text is a vivid example of simplification and modernization of the language with a tendency to vulgarize; at some points, the translator contributes his own inventions to the text in an apparent search for a stronger effect. The modern idioms and slang Poplavskii injects into the tragic context result in a stylistic dissonance that pervades the entire text and produces a double effect—as if one were reading a parody of Hamlet, a burlesque adaptation for a local school theater. In the same year, Nadezhda Korshunova published her version in the small town of Ivanovo. The marginality of this translation can be explained in part by its genre: the title of the translation reads, Hamlet. A Translation of W. Shakespeare’s Play Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Essays. Excursuses into the Text (Koshunova 2001)Apparently, the book is not “just a translation” but also a separate esoteric study of the tragedy with some extraordinary metaphysical insights; it was barely noticed by critics. In 2002, the poet and mathematician Andrei Chernov offered his own poetic translation together with an elaborate exegesis of the play. Chernov is definitely more skilled in versification than his immediate predecessors; his text is fluent and ready-made for enunciation. By the same token, Chernov, in a much more liberal way than Livshits, treats the original as a springboard for free adaptation, introducing rhyme into some passages, including Hamlet’s soliloquies (except “To be or not to be”). This is the most successful new translation so far. It has undergone two editions and was used in the 2002 production at the Stanislavskii Theater in Moscow, directed by Dmitrii Krymov. Moreover, Chernov’s book contains a preface, commentaries and several papers entitled “Notes on Hamlet,” all of which are presented as supporting material for Chernov’s interpretation of the text, which, he states, has not been correctly “deciphered” by generations of Shakespeare scholars. In order to analyze the structure of the play, Chernov uses a whole arsenal of esoteric reading strategies, including the principle of the golden mean and the analogy with the six days of Creation. Briefly, his hypothesis maintains that the play is about Horatio,

280  Aleksei Semenenko who only pretends to be Hamlet’s friend but in reality is a cold-blooded villain and probably a murderer. Chernov’s translation was not favorably received by the critics, and especially by the next translator of Hamlet, Igor’ Peshkov, who ridiculed Chernov’s translation in one of his reviews (Peshkov 2005). Ironically, Peshkov’s own version, first published in 2003, was similar to Chernov’s in one aspect: in both versions, the text itself is overshadowed by the translator’s metatexts, be it Chernov’s “reconstruction” of the hidden message or Peshkov’s presupposed “correct translation” of the text. Peshkov published his translation alongside the English text, compiled out of the existing variants of the Second Quarto and First Folio. In the preface to the translation, Peshkov (2003, xix) declares that the main goal of his translation is not to evaluate the previous tradition (by which he basically means the translations by Andrei Kroneberg (1844), Grand Duke Konstantin Romanov (1899), Mikhail Lozinskii, Anna Radlova, Boris Pasternak and Mikhail Morozov) and its aesthetic value but to provide space for “a more accurate conceptualization of the obscurities of the original.” In reality, Peshkov does not so much “correct the mistakes” as criticize his predecessors, providing often subjective and questionable interpretations presented in a belabored (one might even say “antipoetic”) style. In his translation originality appears at times to take priority over his declared goal of accuracy and approximation to the original. Moreover, the translator’s poor (or imaginary) command of English often leads to outright ignorant, and often comical, comments. In 2010, Peshkov published the second edition of the translation, and in 2011, a separate book which combined his analysis of the play and his attempt to prove that the real author of Shakespeare’s plays was Edward de Vere, seventeenth Earl of Oxford. More on that later. The poet Aleksei Tsvetkov started translating Hamlet in the fall of 2007 and published the translation scene by scene in his blog at aptsvet. livejournal.com. The translation appeared in book form in 2010. Tsvetkov claimed that he strove to translate the play “as a poem, line by line, trying to convey the meaning of the original as closely as possible,” and with “minimum violation of the Russian language.” The most symptomatic of Tsvetkov’s “accuratist” declarations is the explicit dislike of Pasternak (especially in the posting of 14 December 2007), whom he accuses of “distortion” of Shakespeare’s text and of incompetence in the English language. However, Tsvetkov’s own translation is characterized primarily by literalist, often obscure expressions, quite different from Tsvetkov’s own poetic manner, and his interpretations of some obscurities of the play are questionable. Tsvetkov also argues that it is necessary to recreate the original “density of the text” and so uses clashing consonants and paronyms in the translation, thus contradicting his own statements concerning “the minimum violation” of the Russian language.

“Adieu, Remember Me” 281 The poet and translator Andrei Pustogarov’s translation was published on the Internet at roughly the same time as Tsvetkov’s on the portal www.port-folio.org. It is essentially a prose (or vers libre) translation of Hamlet, which is quite untypical for Shakespeare translation in Russia. Usually, prose translations are chosen by the advocates of the literalist approach, but this is not the case with Pustogarov, as illustrated by the first lines of the “to be” soliloquy: Zhit’ ili net—tak vot on, vybor. Chto chestnee—smirit’sia so svirepymi udarami sud’by ili, srazivshis’ s morem bed, ikh prekratit’. Da, umeret’—zasnut’—i bol’she nichego. [To live or not, here is the choice. What is more honest, to endure the severe blows of fate Or, battling against the sea of troubles, to end them. Yes, to die—to sleep—and nothing more.] (Pustogarov 2007, online) In 2008, Sergei Stepanov published his translation of Hamlet and Shakespeare’s sonnets. The actual goal of the book is to prove that Shakespeare is the pen name of Roger Manners, fifth Earl of Rutland, and his wife, Elisabeth. According to Stepanov, the sonnets, once ordered “correctly,” revealed their secret correspondence. Stepanov translates and comments on the sonnets accordingly, in order to prove his theory. He indicates that he used the original English text provided in Peshkov’s edition, but his translation is in fact a heavy compilationist version, exhibiting a preference for Lozinskii’s and Pasternak’s variants and an overall tendency to archaize. Stepanov’s commentary to Hamlet is partly metaphysical (Horatio represents speech, Bernardo sight, Hamlet soul, etc.) and partly connects the text to his theory. The last three translations have passed almost unnoticed in Russian cultural life. One was made by the actor Anatolii Agroskin (2009) and appeared on an Internet portal devoted to Russian Shakespeare: russhake.ru. Agroskin, like Chernov, chose to paraphrase and experiment with the text without any consistent strategy or method. The second was made by the poet and journalist Valerii Anan’in (2010), who published his version in Petrozavodsk and attempted, in his own words, to bring together the two tendencies represented by Lozinskii and Pasternak. Finally, the last translation of Hamlet to date is Aleksandr Baranov’s translation of the “Bad” Quarto (Baranov 2013). It appeared in 2013 on the website rus-shake.ru but was actually produced in 1986 at the request of the prominent Soviet Shakespeare scholar Aleksandr Anikst and was supposed to be published alongside Lozinskii’s translation in a special edition of Hamlet.

282  Aleksei Semenenko It is quite obvious from our overview that no one translation can be said to somehow stand out among the others, let alone dominate in the present period, and this is especially evident in the theater. In recent years, Hamlet has been quite regularly staged (see Bartoshevich 2013), and directors are usually not satisfied with only one translation, and try to combine several existing translations. David Bobée’s 2013 production of Hamlet in the Gogol Center in Moscow is typical of modern theater productions of the tragedy. The director asked his friend to translate Hamlet into modern French, in prose. On the basis of this translation, he then produced a screenplay and gave it to the translator and philologist Rimma Genkina. Genkina used the translations of the usual suspects, Pasternak, Lozinskii, and even Andrei Kroneberg. Furthermore, as she was not proficient in English, she also asked her friend Aleksandr Davydov, son of the famous Soviet poet David Samoilov, to translate some pieces from the play, such as the gravedigger’s song, providing the finishing touch to the textual patchwork that served as the basis of the production. This situation is typical of the process of canon destabilization and partly replicates the situation of the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, when the canon of the nineteenth century, represented by Nikolai Polevoi and Andrei Kroneberg, was also considered to be obsolete. Another characteristic feature of this process is the explicit “profanation of the canon” in various forms, usually through irony and parody.5

From Tragedy to Comedy and Parody The cliché of a melancholy Hamlet dominated nineteenth-century Europe to such an extent that it was almost impossible to dissociate the Danish prince from the “macabre discourse” (Semenenko 2013; Young 2003). The most legendary rebellion against the melancholic Hamlet in Russia was the 1932 production by Nikolai Akimov (1901–1968) at the Moscow Vakhtangov Theater. Akimov accentuated the “low” motif of hunger for power, transforming, for instance, the “sacred” “to be” soliloquy into a reflection on Hamlet’s part as to whether or not he should be king. The very figure of Hamlet, a cheerful and ironic fatty, was in stark contrast to the canonical image. The play included some extravagant elements; even the sets were very complex and colorful. Overall, the genre of Akimov’s Hamlet can be classified as parody in the classical sense of the term: making comedy of tragedy, rendering the “high culture” text in low style. Although the reaction was quite ambivalent, ranging from furious accusations to praise (e.g., Aksenov 1932), the performance was ultimately removed from the theater’s repertory. In the explosive period of the 1990s, the situation was quite similar, and one of the consequences of resistance to the canon was the carnivalization of the previous tradition. In 1999, the journal Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie published the first act of Arkadii Zastyrets’s “eccentric

“Adieu, Remember Me” 283 comedy,” a burlesque parody of Hamlet (the full version was published in 2001 in the journal Ural’skaia nov’). The text was preceded by a short introduction by the writer and cultural historian Petr Vail’ who made several strong statements, which were quite symptomatic of the period of canon destabilization. Vail’ (1999, 35) called Zastyrets’s Hamlet “a desperate attempt to break out from the limits of the Russian Shakespeare, which has so little to do with the real Shakespeare,” and argued that “this Hamlet is much closer to Shakespeare in spirit than Pasternak’s or any other translation in our language” (original emphasis). He explained that Zastyrets’s “burlesque” version fulfills its “Kulturträger function” and approaches “the great original” “from the flanks” and thus makes Shakespeare more accessible to readers (ibid.). Indeed, the text is a parody of the “high” canon of Hamlet, in which the prince wears pink garments and speaks in a contemporary, somewhat foul, jargon, as in the example of the “to be” soliloquy: Imet’ il’ byt’?—voprosets-to ne prost. Osobenno kogda tebia imeiut! Vsia perspektiva rukhnula . . . Aga! Prisvoen datskii tron bezmozglym diadei. V nichtozhestve, kak shavku pri dvore, Menia tut noroviat derzhat’ otnyne. [To have or to be? That’s a tricky one. Especially when you are had [screwed]! All perspectives are gone . . . That’s it! My brainless uncle took the Danish throne. From now on they try to treat me like a nobody, like a street dog.] (Zastyrets 2001, online) The play loosely follows the plot and seemingly moves toward the tragic finale. In the end, however, all the characters, including Claudius, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern, miraculously come back from the dead, because the poison that was the cause of their seeming death appears to be a sleeping potion (obviously borrowed from Romeo and Juliet). The play ends with Hamlet wedding Ophelia to the cheers of the crowd. An even more radical reaction to the Hamlet canon was presented in a text that began circulating the Internet in the late 1990s: an obscene travesty of Hamlet entitled Hamlet, abo Fenomen dats’kogo katsapizmu [Hamlet, or the Phenomenon of Danish Katsapizm] by the Ukrainian writer and artist Les’ Poderv’ians’kyi. The text was written in surzhik (Ukr.: surzhyk), a hybrid mixture of Ukrainian and Russian, and almost exclusively featured grotesque and obscene language. For example, “Katsap” in the title is a derogatory term for a Russian person in the Ukrainian

284  Aleksei Semenenko language and is just one of the ethnic slurs used in the text by Hamlet. All in all, the whole action of this short play revolves around displays of Hamlet’s violence, which leads to an absurd climax: Hamlet (potikhen’ku pochinae tvereziti):—Itogi podved’om. Upizdiv tata. I mamku zapizdiachiv z ridnym diad’kom. Popizdiv mebel’ tsennuiu, herba natsional’noho khuinuv. Usiudy smert’, rozrukha. Ne budu bil’she pyty ia, khoch, pravda, iaka rozumnaia ts’omu al’ternativa? Pizdets’ vsem spodivanniam. Ekh, bliads’ka Daniia. . . Hamlet rve na sobi tovstovku i tykho hrae muzyka, pryemnyi holos spivae “Iabluchko.” Zihmund Freid pidkhodyt’ do Hamleta, kolyt’ ioho y sraku shprytsem i uvodyt’ do bozhevil’noho domu. Na stseni z’iavliaiut’sia semero matrosiv v zhakhlyvykh chornykh bushlatakh. Pisnia “Iabluchko” peremozhno shyryt’sia. Pid vesely zvuky “Iabluchka” matrosy movchky vidbyvaiut’ chochotku. (Poder’vians’kyi 2004, online) [Hamlet (starts to sober up):—Let’s sum it up. I’ve wacked my dad. My mother, too, and my uncle. I fucking destroyed all the expensive furniture, and fucked up the State Emblem real bad. Death and ruin is everywhere. I won’t drink anymore, although what reasonable alternative do I have? All hopes are fucked. Fucking Denmark. . . Hamlet tears his shirt, soft music plays, and a beautiful voice sings “Iablochko.” Sigmund Freud comes up to Hamlet, gives an injection in Hamlet’s ass, and takes him away to an insane asylum. Seven sailors in horrible black sailor’s jackets appear on the stage. “Iablochko” gets louder and louder and the sailors silently dance a tap dance to the music.] It is obvious that Poderv’ians’kyi’s text is a classic example of the carnivalistic “debasing” of a canonical text, carried out ad absurdum. On a more general scale, Poderv’ians’kyi’s work shares many features with the Ukrainian avant-garde Bu-Ba-Bu group founded in 1985, famous for its buffoonery and burlesque irony (see, e.g., Naydan 2006). Boris Akunin’s Gamlet: Versiia [Hamlet: A Version] (2002) was another parodic spin-off of Hamlet. Boris Akunin is the nom de plume of the popular Russian writer of Georgian origin Grigorii Chkhartishvili, famous for the series of historical mystery novels featuring the detective Erast Fandorin. Akunin’s Hamlet seems to follow the traditional plot of the play; only at the end does the reader finally know that the whole action—from the ghost’s apparition to the poisoned rapiers—turns out to be a well-planned conspiracy accomplished by Fortinbras’s spy Horatio, whose real name is von Dorn. The play ends traditionally, with Fortinbras arriving to Elsinore and Horatio briefly explaining what really happened: Eto bylo ne tak trudno, milord. Ponadobilsia malen’kii fokus s prizrakom, podmenennoe pis’mo, dushespasitel’naia beseda s korolevoi,

“Adieu, Remember Me” 285 da neskol’ko kapel’ iada, kotorym ia smazal klinki pered poedinkom. Vashi mnimye piraty, dostavivshie Gamleta obratno v Daniiu, ispolnili zadanie bezukoriznenno. Edinstvennuiu ser’eznuiu ugrozu predstavlial zagovor frantsuzskoi partii, no mne udalos’ vovremia ustranit’ ego predvoditelia, kantslera Poloniia, a molodoi Laert byl neopasen. (Akunin 2002, 113) [It was not very difficult, my lord. All I needed was the little trick with the ghost, the changed letter, a talk with the Queen, and a couple of drops of poison on the blades before the duel. Your fake pirates did an excellent job by bringing Hamlet back to Denmark. The only serious danger was the conspiracy of the French Party, but I managed to neutralize their leader Chancellor Polonius. The young Laertes was not a threat.] Akunin’s clever twist to the familiar story apparently toys with conspiratorial theories around Hamlet. Interestingly enough, this is not a simple coincidence: the conspiratorial discourse occupies quite a significant part of the semiotic field of Hamlet at present and requires a separate excursus.

“O Heinous, Strong and Bold Conspiracy!” In the last 15 years in Russia, there appeared a large body of texts that focused on the question of Shakespeare’s authorship, although this was not the first time this question was raised in Russian culture. The actor Feofan Shipulinskii (1876–1942) was one of the first Russian authors who in his book from 1924 expressed doubts as to the identity of Shakespeare and promoted Roger Manners, fifth Earl of Rutland, as the most likely candidate. The book ends with a conclusion that sums up the ethos of the majority of anti-Stratfordians—namely, that a courtier is a much better candidate for the title of the Bard than a provincial commoner: So when we finally know that Shakespeare is Earl of Rutland [. . .] our imagination will always picture a charming image of a young poet, one of the most educated men of his time, the smartest man of all the mankind, a noble one, with a tender and sensitive soul, in love with the beauty, indignant at evil and lies. (Shipulinskii [1924]) During the Soviet times, the question of authorship was effectively banned from Shakespeare studies, only to be resurrected after 1991. The first book in this genre was Ilia Gililov’s Igra ob Uil’iame Shekspire, ili Taina velikogo Feniksa [The Shakespeare Game, or the Mystery of the Great Phoenix], which was published in 1997 (and in 2003 in English). It produced a mild

286  Aleksei Semenenko cultural shock and was for some time discussed in journals, on the Internet, and even on TV (e.g., in the program Gordon. Sobranie zabluzhdenii [Gordon. A collection of errors], 1999, N10). Gililov, as Shipulinskii, argued that it was Roger Manners and his wife who were disguised under the pseudonym of Shakespeare. Gililov’s book opened a Pandora’s box; conspiratorial theories started dominating the literature on Shakespeare, promoting different candidates for the role of Shakespeare: Christopher Marlowe (Barkov and Maslak 2000; Barkov 2002), the Rutlands (Gililov 1997; Stepanov 2008), William, Earl of Pembroke and Philip, Earl of Montgomery (Novomirova 2003), Edward de Vere (Peshkov 2011, 2015), Francis Bacon and Earl of Rutland (Litvinova 2008), etc. One of the most illustrative examples of conspiratorial discourse is the book Shakespeare. The Secret History, published in St Petersburg in 2003. In the preface, readers are presented with the fantastic story of a Russian publisher who accidentally meets an abbot named Augustine who then sends him a manuscript, written partly in English and partly in Latin, by the mysterious Fathers Kozminius and Melekhtsii (the names are obviously made up). The book is a digest of Shakespeare conspiracy theories from the Russian perspective that is supposed to prove that the Shakespeare project was initiated by Sir Philip Sidney and Edward de Vere, who are, it is also claimed, the real authors of poems attributed to Horace and Virgil (Kozminius and Melekhtsii 2003). It is no coincidence then that the question of Shakespeare’s authorship is closely connected to the genre of New Chronology, represented first and foremost by Anatolii Fomenko, a mathematician who became popular in the 1990s with several books that denied the traditional European version of history and insisted, among other things, that all the documents of medieval Russia (and Europe) were fabricated. It was only a matter of time before Fomenko turned to Shakespeare in order to “prove” that his works in fact described “real” historical events in Russia, with Hamlet becoming the incarnation of Christ (aka Grand Prince Andrei Bogoliubskii) and King Lear representing Ivan the Terrible (Nosovskii and Fomenko 2011). One of the most active anti-Stratfordians is the translator Igor’ Peshkov, whose translation we have already discussed. After the translation, Peshkov produced two books, one in 2011 and the other in 2015, in order to present a more elaborate account of his theory, and has also been actively publishing on Shakespeare in the literary journal Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, practically monopolizing the topic of Shakespeare’s authorship. As mentioned earlier, Peshkov advocates the candidature of Edward de Vere, seventeenth Earl of Oxford. He turns to the 1623 edition of Shakespeare and argues that the Earl of Oxford left two secret signatures in the First Folio. The first one is on the title pages of the book: if the page with actors’ names has the title “The workes of William Shakespeare, containing all his Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies,” the

“Adieu, Remember Me” 287 next face page is entitled “A Catalogue of the severall Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies Contained in this Volume.” For Peshkov, the discrepancy between “all” and “severall” is actually the key to the real name of the author. “Severall” is an anagram of Edward de Vere, and should be read as “E.Ver’s all,” that is, all works by Edward de Vere. Apart from that, the last page is numbered 993 instead of 399, which is also a reference to Vere’s signature: according to the principles of numerology his full name is encoded in the number 993 (although one would need to read the letter “v” in “Vere” as “y” to get exactly 993, but that does not deter Peshkov). On October 5, 2010, the news program Vesti on the TV channel Rossiia made a three-minute report about this discovery, entitled “A Russian Translator Solves Shakespeare’s Mystery.” A question that could be anticipated here is whether this is in some way unique for Russian culture. Conspiracy theories around Shakespeare exist all over the globe and especially in English-speaking countries, with numerous books and Internet communities such as www. doubtaboutwill.org or www.deveresociety.co.uk. Edward de Vere is one of the popular candidates for the role of Shakespeare, and this theory was even exploited in the recent film Anonymous (2011), directed by Roland Emmerich. However, until recently, the relation between “traditional” Shakespeare scholarship and alternative studies in the West has been much more balanced than in the post-Soviet Russia. As one of the prominent Russian Shakespeare scholars laments in his article (Shaitanov 2012), Shakespeare scholarship has been falling into decay; indeed, it is much easier now to find “alternative” literature on Shakespeare than serious scholarly books. In 2013, Igor’ Shaitanov produced a book on Shakespeare in the renown series Zhizn’ zamechatel’nykh liudei [Life of remarkable people] in which he had to dedicate a significant portion to “the Shakespeare question,” and expectedly received a highly critical review from Peshkov (2014), who accused him of dogmatism and bias. In conclusion, the present period exhibits clear signs of canon destabilization, in which the question of Hamlet translation and Shakespeare scholarship in general become closely intertwined. As we have seen, translators of the new period have different goals, strategies, and even pragmatics when translating Hamlet, but what is remarkable is that 4 of 12 (Korshunova, Chernov, Stepanov, Peshkov) resort to some sort of esoteric exegesis, thus making the act of translation secondary to their extratextual commentary. The previous history of Hamlet translation in Russia demonstrates that the poetic value of a translation is actually much more important, and that means that it is more than likely that the next Russian canonical translation of Hamlet will be a new original poetic work rather than “a translation proper” or an elaborate interpretation, based in part on conspiracy theories. None of the discussed translations fits this characteristic, and we may therefore conclude that a new canon of Russian Hamlet is yet to come.

288  Aleksei Semenenko

Notes 1 On Pasternak’s appropriation of Hamlet, see France (1973); Markov (1961); Semenenko (2005, 2013); Witt (2003). 2 After this chapter had been written, at least two more translations of Hamlet by Nikolai Samoilov (2014) and by Aleksei Kozlov (2016) appeared as electronic books on the online bookstore, but they have so far passed virtually unnoticed. 3 Here is the original English text of Hamlet’s soliloquy: To be, or not to be, that is the question:/ Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer/ The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,/ Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,/ And, by opposing, end them [. . .] (Shakespeare 2005, 669). 4 All translations of Russian sources are mine, if not indicated otherwise. 5 This contradicts Yves Gambier’s (1994) suggestion that with time translations of canonical works become more foreignizing. In reality, it is a very cultureand epoch-specific process, and opposing tendencies may also be evident, like in our case of canon destabilization that provokes the creation of much ‘liberal’ versions.

References Agroskin, Anatolii (trans.). 2009. Tragediia o Gamlete, printse Datskom [The Tragedy About Hamlet, Prince of Denmark]. Available online: http://rus-shake. ru/translations/Hamlet/Agroskin/2009/ (Accessed on 23 November 2016). Aksenov, Ivan. 1932. “Tragediia o Gamlete printse Datskom i kak ona byla igrana akterami teatra im. Vakhtangova” [The tragedy of hamlet, prince of Denmark, and how It was played by the actors of the Vakhtangov theater]. Sovetskii teatr 9: 19–22. Akunin, Boris. 2002. Tragediia: Gamlet. Versiia: Tragediia v dvukh aktakh [Tragedy: Hamlet: A version: Tragedy in two acts]. Moscow: Olma-Press. Anan’in, Valerii (trans.). 2010. Uil’iam Shekspir: Gamlet: Zapisi na poliakh perevoda [William Shakespeare: Hamlet: Notes on the magins of the translation]. Petrozavodsk: PetrGU. Baranov, Aleksandr (trans.). 2013. Tragicheskaia istoriia o Gamlete, printse Datskom [The tragic story about Hamlet, Prince of Denmark]. Available online: http://rus-shake.ru/translations/Hamlet/Baranov/2013/ (Accessed on 23 November 2016). Barkov, Al'fred. 2002. “Uiliam Shekspir: probelmy Gamleta, ‘Gamleta’ i avtorstva shekspirovskogo kanona” [William Shakespeare: The problems of Hamlet, ‘Hamlet,’ and the authorship of the Shakespeare canon]. Available online: http://w-shakespeare.narod.ru/hamlet-m.htm (Accessed on 23 November 2016). Barkov, Al'fred N. and Pavel B. Maslak. 2000. U. Shekspir i N.Bulgakov: Nevostrebovannaia genial’nost’ [W. Shakespeare and N. Bulgakov: The unwanted genius]. Kiev: Raduga. Bartoshevich, Aleksei V. 2013. Teatral’nye khroniki: Nachalo dvadtsat’ pervogo veka [Theater chronicles: The early 2000s], 359–364. Moscow: Artist. Rezhisser. Teatr. France, Anna K. 1973. “Boris Pasternak’s Interpretation of Hamlet.” Russian Literature Triquarterly 7: 201–226.

“Adieu, Remember Me” 289 Gambier, Yves. 1994. “La retraduction, retour et détour” [Re-translation, Recurrence, and Digression]. Meta 39 (3): 413–417. Gililov, Il’ia. 1997. Igra ob Uil’iame Shekspire, ili Taina velikogo Feniksa [The William Shakespeare game, or the mystery of the great phoenix]. Moscow: Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniia. Gililov, Il’ia. 2003. The Shakespeare Game: The Mystery of the Great Phoenix. New York: Algora. Korshunova, Nadezhda. 2001. Hamlet: Perevod p’esy V. Shekspira “Hamlet, Prince of Denmark”: Etiudy: Ekskursy v tekst [Hamlet: A translation of W. Shakespeare’s play Hamlet, Prince of Denmark: Essays: Excursuses into the text]. Ivanovo: GP izd. Ivanovo. Kozlov, Aleksei (trans.) 2016. Vil’iam Shekspir: Gamlet, Prints Datskii [Hamlet, Prince of Denmark]. Izdatel’skie resheniia. E-book. Kozminius, o. and o. Melekhtsii. 2003. Shekspir: Tainaia istoriia [Shakespeare: The secret history]. St Petersburg: Neva. Litvinova, Marina. 2008. Opravdanie Shekspira [An apologia for Shakespeare]. Moscow: Vagrius. Livshits, Iurii (trans.). 1991. Gamlet, prints datskii [Hamlet, Prince of Denmark]. Available online: http://lit.lib.ru/l/lifshic_j_i/text_hamlet.shtml (Accessed on 23 November 2016). Lotman, Iurii. 1979. “Culture as Collective Intellect and the Problems of Artificial Intelligence.” In Dramatic Structure: Poetic and Cognitive Semantics: Russian Poetics in Translation 6, edited by Lawrence O’Toole and Ann Shukman, 84–96. Translated by Ann Shukman. Oxford: Holdan Books. Lotman, Iurii. 1990. Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture. Translated by Ann Shukman. London and New York: I. B. Tauris & Co. Lotman, Iurii. 1992. “Pamiat’ v kul’turologicheskom osviashchenii” [Memory from a culturological perspective]. In Iurii, Lotman. Izbrannye stat’i, Tom 1, 200–202. Tallinn: Aleksandra. Lotman, Yuri and Boris Uspensky. 1978. “On the Semiotic Mechanism of Culture.” Translated by George Mihaychuk. New Literary History 9 (2): 211–232. Lotman, Yuri and Boris Uspensky. 1985. “Binary Models in the Dynamics of Russian Culture (to the End of the Eighteenth Century).” Translated by Robert Sorenson. In The Semiotics of Russian Cultural History, edited by Alexander D. Nakhimovsky and Alice Stone Nakhimovsky, 30–66. Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press. Lozinskii, Mikhail (trans.). [1933] 1937. Tragediia o Gamlete, printse datskom [The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark]. Moscow and Leningrad: Academia. Markov, Vladimir. 1961. “An Unnoticed Aspect of Pasternak’s Translations.” Slavic Review 20 (3): 503–508. Naydan, Michael M. 2006. “Ukrainian Avant-Garde Poetry Today: Bu-Ba-Bu and Others.” The Slavic and East European Journal 50 (3): 452–468. Nosovskii, Gleb and Anatolii Fomenko. 2011. O chem na samom dele pisal Shekspir: Ot Gamleta-Christa do korolia Lira-Ivana Groznogo[What Shakespeare really wrote about: From Hamlet the Christ to Lear-Ivan the Terrible]. Moscow: AST. Novomirova, Valentina. 2003. Kto pridumal Shekspira? [Who invented Shakespeare?]. Kiev: Izd. T. Kvasova.

290  Aleksei Semenenko Pasternak, Boris (trans.). 1940. “Gamlet, prints datskii: Tragediia” [Hamlet, Prince of Denmark: Tragedy]. Molodaia gvardiia 5–6: 15–131. Peshkov, Igor’. 2003. Shekspir: Gamlet (V poiskakh podlinnika) [Shakespeare: Hamlet (In search of the original)]. Perevod, podgotovka teksta originala, kommentarii i vvodnaia stat’ia I. V. Peshkova. Moscow: Labirint. Peshkov, Igor’. 2005. “Est’ mnogoe na svete: Vrag Goratsio i t.p., ili perevody shekspirovskogo ‘Gamleta’ kak povod dlia sensatsii” [There are a lot of things in the world: Horatio the enemy etc., Hamlet translations as an excuse for the sensation]. Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 72: 351–363. Peshkov, Igor’. 2011. Avtor “Gamleta” ostavil nam svoiu podpis’ [‘Hamlet’s’ Author Left Us His Signature]. Moscow: Labirint. Peshkov, Igor’. 2014. “Prizrak odnopartiinosti” [The spirit of the single-partiedness]. Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie [Review of Shaitanov 2013] 126: 374–384. Peshkov, Igor’. 2015. F1, ili Kniga dokazatel’stv: Teorema Shekspira kak lemma avtorstva [F1 or the book of proofs: The Shakespeare theoreme as the lemma of the authorship]. Moscow: RIPOL klassik. Poderv’ians’kyi, Les’. 2004. Hamlet, abo Fenomen dats’koho katsapizmu [Hamlet, or the phenomenon of Danish katsapizm]. Available online: www.lib.ru/ ANEKDOTY/hamlet.txt (Accessed on 23 November 2016). Poplavskii, Vitalii (trans). 2001. V. Shekspir: Tragicheskaia istoriia Gamleta, datskogo printsa [The tragic story of Hamlet, prince of Denmark]. Moscow: Zhuravlev. Pustogarov, Andrei (trans.). 2007. Gamlet [Hamlet]. Available online: www.portfolio.org/2006/part180.htm (Accessed on 23 November 2016). Radlova, Anna (trans.). 1937. Vil’iam Shekspir: Gamlet, prints datskii [Hamlet, prince of Denmark]. Moscow and Leningrad: Iskusstvo. Rapoport, Vitalii (trans). 1999. Tragediia Gamleta, printsa datskogo [The tragedy of Hamlet, prince of Denmark]. Available online: http://lib.ru/SHAKE SPEARE/haml_rap.txt (Accessed on 23 November 2016). Samoilov, Nikolai (trans.). 2014. Uil’iam Shekspir. Sonety. Gamlet. [William Shakespeare. Sonnets. Hamlet]. Montreal: Accent Graphics Communications. E-book. Semenenko, Aleksei. 2005. “ ‘Gamletovskii kontekst’ Borisa Pasternaka” [Boris Pasternak’s Hamlet context]. Scando-Slavica 51: 31–48. Semenenko, Aleksei. 2007. Hamlet the Sign: Russian Translations of Hamlet and Literary Canon Formation (Acta Universitatis Stockholmiensis: Stockholm Studies in Russian Literature 39). Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International. Semenenko, Aleksei. 2011. “ ‘No Text Is an Island’: Translating ‘Hamlet’ in the Twenty-First Century Russia.” In Contexts, Subtexts and Pretexts: Literary Translation in Eastern Europe and Russia, edited by Brian James Baer, 249– 263. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Semenenko, Aleksei. 2013. “Gamlet, Mariia Magdalina i Melankholiia: O nekotorykh mekhanizmakh kollektivnoi pamiati” [Hamlet, Maria Magdalene, and melancholy: On some mechanisms of collective memory]. In Sluchainost’ i nepredskazuemost’ v istorii kul’tury, edited by I. A. Pil’shchikov, 208–221. Tallinn: Izdatel’stvo TLU. Shaitanov, Igor’. 2012. “Tendentsii i intentsii otechestvennogo shekspirovedeniia” [Tendencies and intentions of our shakespeare studies]. Voprosy literatury 2: 456–475.

“Adieu, Remember Me” 291 Shaitanov, Igor’. 2013. Shekspir [Shakespeare]. Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia. Shakespeare, William. 2005. The Complete Works. 2nd Edition, edited by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Shipulinskii, Feofan. [1924]. Kto skryvalsia po maskoi Shekspira [Who was hiding under the mask of Shakespeare]. Available online: www.w-shake speare.ru/library/kto-skrivalsa-pod-maskoy-shekspira.html (Accessed on 26 November 2016). Stepanov, Sergei (trans.). 2008. Uil’am Shekspir: Gamlet, prints Datskii: Sonety [William Shakespeare: Hamlet, Prince of Denmark]. Moscow: Amfora. Toury, Gideon. 1981. “Translated Literature: System, Norm, Performance: Toward a TT-Oriented Approach to Literary Translation.” Poetics Today 2 (4): 9–27. Toury, Gideon. 1981 / 1995. Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: Benjamin. Tsvetkov, Aleksei (trans.). 2007. Tragediia Gamleta, printsa datskogo [The tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark]. Available online: http://aptsvet.livejournal.com/ tag/гамлет (Accessed on 26 November 2016). Vail’, Petr. 1999. “Vmesto predisloviia” [Instead of a foreword]. Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 35: 95. Witt, Susanna. 2003. “Perevod kak mimikriia: ‘Gamlet’ Pasternaka” [Translation as mimicry: Pasternak’s ‘Hamlet’]. Swedish Contributions to the Thirteenth International Congress of Slavists, Ljubljana, 15–21 August 2003, edited by B. Englund Dimitrova and A. Pereswetoff-Morath, 145–156. Lund: Lund University Press. Young, Alan R. 2003. “Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Visual Representations of the Graveyard Scene in Hamlet.” In Stage Directions in Hamlet: New Essays and New Directions, edited by Hardin L. Aasand, 189–213. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Zastyrets, Arkadii. 1999. “Gamlet: Ekstsentricheskaia komediia v 5 deistviiakh. Deistvie I.” [Hamlet: Eccentric comedy in five acts: Act I.]. Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 35: 96–116. Zastyrets, Arkadii. 2001. “Gamlet: Ekstsentricheskaia komediia v 5 deistviiakh” [Hamlet: Eccentric comedy in five acts]. Ural’skaia nov’ 10. Available online: http://magazines.russ.ru/urnov/2001/10/zast.html (Accessed on 26 November 2015).

18 Poetic Translation and the Canon The Case of the Russian Auden1 Elena Ostrovskaya

Auden and the Russian Canon In his book Conversations with Joseph Brodsky: A Poet’s Journey through the Twentieth Century, musicologist and writer Solomon Volkov presents W. H. Auden as a poet virtually unknown in Russia, or, for that matter, to Volkov himself, although he exerted an important influence over the Russian Nobel laureat: “The famous poet Wystan Hugh Auden [. . .], who is hardly known in Russia. I started reading his poetry and prose after attending your lectures at Columbia University” (Volkov 1998, 135).2 At the same time, he is one of the few poets “who have been so cardinally distinct for [Brodsky], such unique spirits” (Volkov 2002, 89). Volkov’s acquaintance with the English-American poet, mediated by Brodsky, preempts a similar story told by his famous interviewee: “The first person to talk about Auden seriously with me was my friend Andrei Sergeev [. . .] So here I naturally took an interest in Auden and set about anything I could get my hands on. And what I could get my hands on was an anthology of new English poetry published in 1937 and compiled by Gutner” (Volkov 2002, 128–129). The unknown poet as discovered by Brodsky in the early 1960s has long since become an established author with a number of books in Russian translation. However, the question still stands: What is Auden for the Russian audience, still an unknown entity, a classic, or a poet admired by Brodsky alone? Is there such a thing as an Auden canon in Russian? Or is he part of Brodsky’s biographical myth? What does the original (English) Auden canon have to do with its Russian counterpart? The present chapter approaches this issue from the perspective of translation studies, as it addresses the matter of literature and the canon. Tracing the history of Auden’s poetic translations into Russian, it focuses on the book form and presents it as a trajectory from a selection of poems in an anthology of modern English verse (Antologiia novoi angliiskoi poezii (Gutner 1937)) to individual volumes of “collected poems” in translation (Sobraniie stikhotvorenii (Auden 1997)).3 The selections addressed— “Gutner’s anthology” from Brodsky’s story, three anthologies of the

Poetic Translation and the Canon 293 mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, and Toporov’s collection of 1997—are considered the highlights of the canonization process over three consecutive periods and are discussed in their literary and socio-historic context, as evident in contemporary criticism and translations, memoirs, editorial practices, etc. Thus, the timespan of the study, beginning in the early 1930s, traces attempts to introduce the poet to the Soviet reader: from Soviet periodicals—namely, the journal Internatsional’naia literatura, to a series of book publications in the 2000s.

Translation and the Canon Anthologies, one of the foci of current research (along with collections of poems), have been discussed as “a staple institution for the mediation of poetry,” or “a prime medium for preserving and disseminating poetry” (Korte 2000, 5–6), a medium, “essential to the transmission of poetry from the relative ephemerality of periodicals and slim volumes into a more mainstream communication with readers” (Strauss 1987, 87). Barbara H. Smith in her seminal book Contingencies of Value presents anthologies as “a metaphor for the operation of various social determinants of literary value,” describing its mechanisms at work: The recommendation of value represented by the repeated inclusion of a particular work in anthologies of “great poetry” not only promotes, but goes some distance towards creating the value of that work, as does its repeated appearance on reading lists or its frequent citation or quotation by professors, scholars, critics, poets, and other elders of the tribe; for all these acts have the effect of drawing the work into the orbit of attention of potential readers and, by making the work more likely to be experienced at all, they make it more likely to be experienced as “valuable.” In this sense, value creates value. (Smith 1991, 10) Quoting Maurice Blanchot’s aphorism “Classical masterpieces live only in translation,” Lawrence Venuti emphasizes a similar role for translation as a cultural practice: “the very fact of translation not only implies that the text has been judged valuable enough to bring into another culture, but also increases this value” (Venuti 2008, 27). Venuti describes translation’s contribution to the “canonizing process” in terms of “inscription,” understood mainly as association with “dominance in academic or other powerful cultural institutions” (28). To refocus my original research questions, along with the actual history of Auden’s translation into Russian, I am going to study the mechanisms of “inscription,” the added socio-cultural values underlying the processes of “collecting and selecting” (Korte 2000, 3) that comprise the making of an anthology and/or a collection of verse.

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The Beginnings of a Russian Auden The most stunning fact about the introduction of Auden to the Russian, or to be more exact, Soviet audience is that it occurred almost simultaneously with his recognition by the English reading public. The poet’s emergence on the literary landscape, his first publications and critical reception are closely associated with “social poetry” and left-wing Oxford intellectuals. It was as early as 1934 that the “Oxford group” of poets (Spender, Day-Lewis, and Auden) became the focus of interest for Soviet ideologists of world literature. For instance, it was mentioned in Karl Radek’s speech at the First Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934 (printed in the journal Internatsional’naia literatura) as “the beginning of a proletarian literature in England”: “In the heart of bourgeois England, at Oxford, where the sons of the English bourgeoisie are educated, a group is taking shape which realizes that the only salvation lies in alliance with the proletariat” (Radek 1934, 310). The year 1936 saw even more interest in English poetry in general and the “Oxford group” in particular: The same journal Internatsional’naia literatura devoted to it a whole section consisting of two essays: “Sovremennaia angliiskaia poeziia” [Contemporary English poetry]—which was “an excerpt from a book” by one of the poets of the group, Cecil Day-Lewis (apparently, A Hope for Poetry, 1934)—and “О revoliutsionnykh tendentsiiakh v noveishei angliiskoi poezii (1930–1935)” [Some revolutionary trends in modern English poetry. 1930–1935] by John Lehmann, an English poet as well as an editor, founder of the journal New Writing, and a long-term contributor to Internatsional’naia literatura (Dei-L’iuis 1936; Lehmann 1936). The first essay was translated by Igor’ Romanovich, a member of Ivan Kashkin’s perevodcheskii kollektiv [translators’ group], later to become Kashkin’s “school of translation,” and a regular contributor to Internatsional’naia literatura. This essay is more than just an overview, with lavish quotations and sections of analysis. Surprisingly, it contains what appears to be the first translation of an entire poem by W. H. Auden into Russian; among snippets of other poems Day-Lewis includes “Sir, no man’s enemy, forgiving all,” translated by the same Romanovich (Dei-L’iuis 1936, 164). Day-Lewis presents Auden as a satirist, however, emphasizing the pure poetic value of his work (“The subject-matter of his verse would seem to be irretrievably ‘prosaic’; yet, if we try to express almost any poem of his in prose, we find it impossible; its rare spirit evaporates in the process” (Day Lewis 1934, 44; Dei-L’iuis 1936, 164)). Lehmann’s article, originally published in the English version of the journal International Literature (Lehmann 1936) and then translated for the Russian edition,4 introduced two formative publications—namely the collections compiled by Michael Roberts, New Signatures (Roberts 1932) and New Country (Roberts 1933), relying on them for his choice of subjects. His discussion of Auden also moves from anthology to

Poetic Translation and the Canon 295 anthology, as he touches upon the poet’s fame and explores his influence over other poets of his generation. However, unlike Day-Lewis, Lehmann accentuates the political aspect of Auden’s poetry, its “remarkable dramatic sense of a collapsing culture, a civilization desperately ill [. . .]” (Lehmann1936, 69), and his contribution to “revolutionary poetry.” Apparently, with ideology in its purest and crudest sense being the call of the day, the most important criterion for selection was political, further enhanced by the criticism, context, etc., all parts of the process André Lefevere refers to as rewriting (1992, 9). However, the poetic or aesthetic value seems of a higher order. With the two main ingredients of the inscription being ideology and aesthetics, surprisingly, the aesthetic appears to be rated higher. Even more striking is the fact that the agents of rewriting and inscription were the very same as those propagating this kind of poetry in Britain (namely, Lehmann and Day-Lewis) and inscribing it with an added value for British journals and anthologies, thus shaping both British and Russian reading audiences. These two publications lay the foundation for the occasional translations that would appear in periodicals in the years to follow. The first stand­ alone poem by W. H. Auden appeared on the pages of Internatsional’naia literatura in 1938: his famous poem “Spain,” translated by Mikhail Zenkevich, a clearly politically motivated selection (Oden 1938). Timofei Rokotov, the then acting editor-in-chief of the journal, engaged in correspondence with the poet, asking for more poems for publication. However, the year 1939 put an end not only to the “clever hopes” of the “low dishonest decade,” but also to the hopes of Internatsional’naia literatura to become a venue for Auden’s poems. The journal Znamia managed to publish a translation of Auden’s “Brothers, who when the sirens roar. . . .” in 1939 (Oden 1939), but that was it. However, as Rokotov was courting the young British poet, an anthology of new English poetry, supposedly compiled by a young scholar of German and British literature Mikhail Gutner, appeared in Leningrad. The so-called Gutner’s anthology (Gutner 1937) featured nine poems by Auden brought to a Russian audience by three different translators, Igor’ Romanovich, Evgenii Tarasov, and Vladimir Zukkau-Nevskii.

An Anthology among Anthologies If the purpose of an anthology is to transmit poetry “from the relative ephemerality of periodicals and slim volumes into a more mainstream communication with readers” (Strauss 1987, 87), it comes as no surprise that the early 1930s were a time of anthologies for the young British leftwing poets. As Stephen Spender later wrote in his memoir World Within World (1951), “These two anthologies [New Signatures and New Country] revealed the existence of a new, for the most part socially conscious, group of young writers” (quoted in Izzo 2003, 181) soon to move from

296  Elena Ostrovskaya the position of emerging poets to the center of the poetiс stage, as represented in the two most famous British anthologies of the 1930s (both published in 1936): the Faber Book of Modern Verse (Roberts 1936), collected by the very same Michael Roberts, and the noteworthy The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, 1892–1935, Chosen by W. B. Yeats, which was much more arbitrary in its selection. In the Soviet Union, the 1930s were a time when the Soviet audience was being introduced to the (proletarian or suppressed) poetry of different countries, resulting in two anthologies of American Black poetry (1933, 1936), one of French (1934) and Azeri (1939) poetry, to be followed by an anthology of Armenian poetry in 1940, and two anthologies of Englishlanugage poetry, the aforementioned Antologiia novoi angliiskoi poezii [Anthology of new English poetry] (Gutner 1937) and Poety Ameriki: XX vek [Poets of America: 20th century] (Kashkin and Zenkevich 1939). The compiler and editor of Antologiia novoi angliiskoi poezii was, as mentioned earlier, Mikhail Gutner, or so the book says. However, it is Prince Dmitry Mirsky,5 arrested in 1937, who is widely considered to be the real compiler of the anthology. G. S. Smith, Mirsky’s biographer, writes, Pride of place among Mirsky’s Soviet works on English literature in terms of physical size and continuing value is held by the Anthology of Modern English Poetry that he prepared for publication, bringing together a splendid team of translators and calling into play all the knowledge he had accumulated about English poetry to inform his Introduction and Notes. (Smith 2000, 253) Smith also singles out Auden among the poets of the anthology, focusing on Brodsky’s later reception of the poet (254). The anthology’s selection reveals firsthand knowledge of Auden’s publications of the time. The perspective on Auden presented in the introduction and biographical notes on the poet is very similar to that of John Lehmann, describing Auden as a contributor to New Signatures and New Country and thus attributing a certain authority and value to Michael Roberts and his anthologies. The introduction to Antologiia novoi angliiskoi poezii, in which Roberts’ name is replaced by the collective and thus ideologically more proper “group of poets,” however, offers a Soviet version of the revolutionary trends in English poetry: 1931 marks a turning point in English poetry from the Decadents and Georgian poets to “the healthier poetic movement.” The ideas of communism find their way into the left wing of English poetry. [. . .] In 1932 a group of leftist poets publishes an anthology New Signatures and in 1933—New Country, with a contribution from such a prominent poet as Auden. (Gutner 1937, 21–22)

Poetic Translation and the Canon 297 The biographical note presents Auden as the most prominent poet in the collection and mentions his first published book, Poems, as well as two later satirical works, Orators and Dance of Death (445). With all the emphasis placed on the British anthologies in the introduction, one might think that the selection of poems would follow their lead. However, this is not the case. Judging by the poems chosen and their titles, the anthology comprises an original selection based on the second edition of Auden’s first collection Poems (Auden 1933) (or its American version (Auden 1934)) with the addition of a later piece, “The Dream,” published in the twentieth issue of New Verse (April-May 1936) and first included in collections much later, in 1945 (Bloomfield, Cambray and Mendelson 1972, 26). Similarities to the British anthologies are rare: Romanovich’s reprinted translation of “Sir, No Man’s Enemy” is the only poem from Faber’s selection of 1936, while among the three poems of New Signatures just one is to be found in Gutner’s anthology, “Chorus from a Play.” Judging by the title, however, the source of it is Poems 1933, where it appears as “Doom Is Dark and Deeper than Any Seas-dingle.” The perspective of the anthology is very similar to that of Internatsio­ nal’naia literatura. With ideology as the backbone, the emphasis is on the aesthetic quality of Auden’s poetry, which, in turn, is supposed to enhance the value of the anthology as a whole; value creates value. The authorship of Mirsky suggests that this book project, as well as the journal, relied on a mediator with firsthand knowledge of British culture, who was a participant in the literary process in Britain. As surprising as it may seem, on Auden’s way to the Russian reader in the late 1930s, the critical reception of his work suffered very little distortion as compared to the reception of the British original, thus limiting the mechanisms of “rewriting” to translation per se and “inscribing” with ideological value, such as the role of the collective and the central place of Communist ideas. A unique quality of the cultural exchange between Great Britain and the Soviet Union at this time is the surprisingly small distance in critical perspective, despite the complicated relationship between the two countries. The left-wing British intellectuals were taking great steps toward the USSR, and ideologically, poetry was a relatively “safer” literary field in the USSR, and therefore not as guarded. Thus the Soviet anthology of new English poetry was able to respond rather rapidly to events in Britain’s poetry scene. This close connection was in many ways inspired by the common feeling of an impending catastrophe, intensifying the acute sense of a cultural life that was about to come to an end. For the Soviet critics and translators, the end was very literal as by the time the anthology was printed, Mirsky had already been arrested; Romanovich’s turn was to come the next year, and the siege of Leningrad was to take the life of Tarasov only a few years later. For Auden himself, the divide was more of a symbolic nature, marked by the two pacts of 1938–1939 followed by his own move to the United States in 1939. For the Russian audience it meant that the Auden of the 1930s was left behind.

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The American Auden: A New Canon The poet’s move to the US divided the canon into the “early” and “later” Auden (Mendelson 1981; 2000). His first American book of poetry, comprising his most quotable and commonly read pieces, was Another Time (Auden 1940). The first collected volumes followed soon after (1945 Random House edition (Auden 1945) and 1950 Faber and Faber (Auden 1950) for the American and English editions, respectively). Thus, Auden’s American canon came into being. In the Soviet Union, the division was much more evident: after 1940, translations stopped for decades, and only on rare occasion were Auden’s books reviewed in Soviet periodicals. The name of the by then American poet returned to the printed page only much later, and his works were still divided between the selections published in periodicals and selections printed in different anthologies. The anthology Sovremennaia amerikanskaia poeziia [Contemporary American poetry], edited by Aleksei Zverev and Inna Levidova (Zverev and Levidova 1975), contained a selection of 13 of Auden’s poems, translated by Pavel Grushko and Andrei Sergeev. The late 1970s and 1980s saw a flourishing of anthologies, with the next noteworthy selection appearing in Zapadnoevropeiskaia poezia dvadtsatogo veka [Western European poetry of the twentieth century] (Bochkareva et al. 1977). This edition, part of the Library of World Literature series, contained seven poems, three of them reproduced from the 1975 anthology, three republished from periodicals, and a new one, “In Praise of Limestone,” in Sergeev’s translation; the other translators were Asar Eppel’ and Eduard Shuster. Another noteworthy anthology compiled by Stanislav Dzhimbinov, Amerikanskaia poezia XIX–XX veka v russkikh perevodakh [American poetry of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Russian translation] (Dzhimbinov 1983), was quite different from Zverev’s in scope and approach (two centuries of American poetry rather than one), although it reproduced some of the translations from the earlier anthology (with more from Asar Appel’ and Viktor Toporov). In their choice of poems, the anthologies of the 1970–1980s seem to ignore not only the translations of the 1930s but also the whole of the early Auden. His internationally best-known poems, apart from “Spain,” had not been translated yet, and the publications of the 1970–1980s were meant to fill the gap: “Musée Des Beaux Arts,” “The More Loving One,” “An Epitaph to a Tyrant,” “The Unknown Citizen,” “The Shield of Achilles,” “In Praise of Limestone” and “September 1, 1939.” This core of the original Auden canon, his most anthologized poems, were translated by Grushko and Sergeev, thus acquainting the Russian public with the “classical” face of the famous poet. By this time, the ideological attraction of Auden in the Soviet context was gone as he was no longer an emerging leftist poet. However, the 1960s brought about a different source of interest in the poet: the fact

Poetic Translation and the Canon 299 of his being an American poet. In his essay on Brodsky covering mainly 1964, Andrei Sergeev reminisces about his and his friends’ attitude to America and American poetry: At the time we were all taken in by America. Relieved from Stalin [as we were], [we] believed that for every evil here there is a good in America. [. . .] We made the great discovery that America is not what is covered with spittle by Charlie Chaplin and the like—a gray, disgusting country, on which the sun never looks, but a wonderful country of wonderful people with amazing nature—and all that was there, in the great American poetry, to which there was no match in the West in this century. So we had this growing feeling of a second home country, that we had a home country in reserve. (Sergeev 1997, 433) This memoir is of double value for the present purpose, as apart from being firsthand evidence; it comes from a person who was one of the most knowledgeable when it comes to American poetry of the time and one of the originators of the late-Soviet (Russian) Auden canon. (Cf. Brodsky: “If there has ever existed any kind of higher court for me on matters of poetry, then it was Sergeev’s opinion” (Volkov 1998, 128).) To characterize the situation of the 1970–1980s in general, it echoed that of the 1930s, even if in a somewhat different way. The interest in Western literature far outstripped the language competence of the public, as well as access to the original texts. In the 1930s, interest in literature was immense among the masses as well as the intelligentsia as evidenced by the circulation of journals like Internatsional’naia literatura and the readers’ response to them (Safiullina 2009); the 1960s also brought about a surge of interest in poetry and the outside world, which was in a way reflected in the anthologies of the 1970–1980s, intended for a wide reading public, especially in the Library of World Literature Series. The love for things American as described by Sergeev appears to be characteristic of a particular social stratum, but it was the one responsible for compiling the anthologies and translating the poems.6 Once again, Auden’s work was inscribed with political meaning; however, the undercurrent had by this time changed completely. From the revolutionary poet of the 1930s, he had become the master of doublespeak and Aesopian language in the 1960s.7 The 1939, “An Epitaph to a Tyrant” or “The Unknown Citizen” with their implicit invective, as well as “August 1968” with its rather explicit title, all of them translated and included in these anthologies (the title of the latter, obviously, had to be replaced by the first line in the 1983 anthology, “The ogre does what the ogres can”), characterized the tongue-in-cheek spirit of the late-Soviet decades, inscribing Western culture with political freedom as well as cultural value.

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Brodsky and the Post-Soviet Auden Canon Following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the lifting of censorship restrictions, a surge in publications of all kinds, including translations, occurred. Joseph Brodsky’s five-volume collected poems, which soon turned into six and then seven volumes, was among the first big book projects of the era, marking a new freedom in publishing, as well as the central place of the poet in the new cultural landscape. By this time Auden had become part of Brodsky’s biographical myth and poetic credo: the prominent English poet he admired, who wrote a preface to his first book in English translation and who introduced him to life in the American West (Volkov 2002, 125–154). Translator of the poems “Funeral Blues” and “Memory of W. B. Yeats,” Brodsky added to Auden’s poetry the missing ingredient—the value of canonical status: the poet to whom the Russian Nobel prize winner looked up to had to be a classic. A boom in publications about Auden occurred in Russia in the mid- to late 1990s. New translations of both poems and essays appeared regularly in journals such as Inostrannaia literatura (1995, 2011), Novaia iunost’ (1996, 1997, 2004), Literaturnoe obozrenie (1999), Literaturnaia ucheba (2005), Neva (2000), and Oktiabr’ (2008). It was also a time that saw Auden’s name on Russian book covers. All in all, five books were published. The bilingual collection of poems with translations by Toporov was the first to come out, in 1997 (Oden 1997), closely followed by a monumental collection of essays translated and edited by Gleb Shulpiakov (Oden 1998a) and Zastol’nye besedy s Alanom Ansenom [Table Talk with Allan Ansen], translated by Shulpiakov and Dadian (Oden 1998b). In 2003 another collection of poems, translated by Viacheslav Shestakov (Oden 2003a), saw the light of the day, as well as the second Russian edition of Table Talk with Allan Ansen; finally, Auden’s lectures on Shakespeare came out as a separate volume in 2008 (Oden 2008). Importantly, in 2015–2016 new editions of the essay collection and The Table Talk of W. H. Auden (Ansen, Jenkins and Howard 1990) were published.

Poet and Translator: Auden in Toporov’s Translation An important difference between an anthology and a one-poet collection of poems is that the latter gives a reader the chance to have a dialogue with a specific author. To get back to Venuti’s terms, a new book of a poet’s translations would mean a reinterpretation and reevaluation of his poetry and his place in the culture. A book, such as the one compiled by Viktor Toporov, with just one translator for all the poems, means, for one thing, a holistiс interpretation of both the meaning and value of the poet’s work, thus making them even more inseparable (cf. Venuti 2008, 29).

Poetic Translation and the Canon 301 This is also a situation in which double reevaluation, so to speak, takes place, that is, inscribing value works both ways, not only from translator to poet, but also from poet to translator. Importantly, the first seed of Toporov’s book is to be found in his contribution to Dzhimbinov’s 1983 anthology. His translations of “The Shield of Achilles” and “O Where Are You Going” marked an important turn in the canon of the day as the latter brought back the “early Auden.” Toporov’s book continued this approach by including both early and late verse so as to make the selection representative of the poet’s entire poetic oeuvre. Another important feature of the volume is the scholarly apparatus, consisting of an introduction, commentary, and original text. In terms of (re)interpretation and (re)evaluation, Toporov’s introduction is the most explicit part of the book, discussing Auden’s poetry in general and the selection to follow. It presents Auden as a quintessential poet of the twentieth century, tracing in his life and work the tragic fate of a poet and poetry across the century. Poetry is represented by such “eternal geniuses” as Goethe, Thoreau, and Brodsky, while the life and work of Auden is discussed in relation to his contemporaries and other British poets (W. B. Yeats, Thomas Hardy, Housman, G. M. Hopkins, Rupert Brook, etc.). Juggling names and quotations from various sources, from the Soviet Marshal Sergei Akhromeev to the Swedish poet Gunnar Ekelöf, whom he mistakenly presents as a Nobel prize winner, Toporov chooses to construct his own biography of Auden, citing no secondary sources except for Joseph Brodsky and Aleksei Zverev, one of the editors of the 1975 anthology. Both of them are referred to in adjoining paragraphs in connection with “September 1, 1939,” emphasizing the particular place of this poem within the Auden canon as well as inscribing authority to Toporov’s own speculation. He refers the English-speaking readers to Brodsky’s zamechatelnyi [wonderful] analysis of the poem and goes on to quote an extensive paragraph from Zverev (the only extensive quotation in the essay), characterizing the changes in the poet’s outlook at the turn of the decade (Oden 1997, 18–19). Apparently, substituting consistent citation, as used in academic discourse, with namedropping, which is his claim to erudition, Toporov still refers to Brodsky and Zverev in a more or less traditional way, inscribing the work of Auden and his own translation with the authority of world poetry (and by extension, Brodsky) and domestic literary criticism. I would argue that this kind of citation reflects the main principles underlying the collection as a whole: building on the idea of canon as proposed by the anthologies of the 1970s, one of which contained a contribution by Toporov himself, he develops it into an individual project, a poet on poet collection appearing in the post-Soviet period of pluralism, still relying on the ideology of the previous decades, but having lost its zeal and thus moving into the age of connoisseurship, with access to publishing resources, but lacking a broad readership.

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Conclusion Throughout the twists and turns of Soviet history, the story of Auden’s translations into Russian seems to repeat and accentuate the outline of the original canon. A kind of divide (geography in Auden’s life, time—almost four decades—in translation) makes the two periods of the poet’s life his two poetic faces: the “early” stood for the prominent representative of the young, while the “later” was the living and then the recently deceased American classic. In some ways, it was this divide that started “the making of the Auden canon” (Beach 1957). However, it was the mere lack of classicism or canonicity that made the mechanisms of rewriting and inscribing so important and so obvious in his Russian translations: the aesthetic as well as ideological value was always emphasized to legitimize the translation and selection. Paradoxically, in terms of ideology the Auden of Sergeev and Brodsky is the polar opposite of that of the 1930s. Moreover, the foundation of the canon was laid in the translations and anthologies of the 1970s and then cemented by the intricate network of memoirs by Brodsky and Sergeev, associating both with the beginning of the canon. Today it is the few translations by Grushko and Sergeev that are most widely quoted, even by Toporov’s fellow translators (Kruzhkov 2011). In this perspective Toporov’s volume represents the end of the canon. Moving beyond the original “classical” selections, Toporov constructs a heavily individualized Auden, which his contemporaries will still contemplate through the optics of the canon of the 1970s, while the audience of the 2000–2010s will sooner read it against the multiple professional and amateur translations to be found on the Internet.

Notes 1 This article presents results of the project “European Literature of 19–20th Centuries in the Cross-Cultural Perspective: Text and Context,” carried out within the framework of the Basic Research Program at the National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow in 2015. 2 Quoted from the Russian edition of the book; translation is mine (E.O.) as with all the Russian quotes unless otherwise indicated. Interestingly, the English edition has fewer indications of Auden’s lack of popularity or even recognition in Russia. Thus the quoted passage is missing (Volkov 2002, 128). In the English edition Volkov seems to accentuate the role of Brodsky as a mediator for him personally rather than the Russian audience, “As a memento of those days, I have a bookshelf packed with many volumes by and about Frost and Auden, whose work I had not known very well before these encounters” (Volkov 2002, ix). 3 A later book of Auden’s verse in Viacheslav Shestakov’s translation (Auden 2003) is much smaller in terms of the compilation and in many ways goes beyond the scope of the present study, so it will not be discussed in detail. 4 Unlike in the previous one, though, the name of the translator is not indicated. 5 A literary critic and historian D.S. Mirsky (pen name of Prince D.S. Sviatopolk), widely known as Prince Mirsky, especially for his A History of Russian Literature: From Its Beginnings to 1900 in Two Volumes (1926, 1927). After a

Poetic Translation and the Canon 303 decade of emigration in London, he chose to return to the Soviet Union in 1932 only to be arrested in 1937. He died in the Gulag labor camps in 1939. 6 A historical note on this love for things American of the time and a case study of Hemingway translations as an important source of influence is to be found in the works of Alexander Burak (Burak 2013a, 2013b). 7 As defined by Lev Loseff as “a special literary system, one whose structure allows interaction between author and reader at the same time that it conceals inadmissible content from the censor” (Loseff 1984, x).

References Primary Sources Auden, Wystan Hugh. 1933. Poems. 2nd Edn. London: Faber & Faber. Auden, Wystan Hugh. 1934. Poems. 1st Edn. New York,NY: Random House. Auden, Wystan Hugh. 1940. Another Time: Poems. New York, NY: Random House. Auden, Wystan Hugh. 1945. The Collected Poetry of W.H. Auden. New York, NY: Random House. Auden, Wystan Hugh. 1950. Collected Shorter Poems, 1930–1944. London: Faber and Faber. Bochkareva, I. et al. (eds.). 1977. Zapadnoevropeiskaia poeziia dvadtsatogo veka [West European poetry of the 20th century]. Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia Literatura. Day-Lewis, Cecil. 1934. A Hope for Poetry. Oxford: B. Blackwell. Dei-L’iuis, Sesil [Day-Lewis, Cecil]. 1936. “Sovremennaia angliiskaia poeziia” [Contemporary English poetry]. Internatsional’naia literatura 5: 151–172. Dzhimbinov, Stanislav. 1983. Amerikanskaia poeziia XIX-XX veka v russkikh perevodakh [American poetry of the 19–20th century in Russian translation]. Moscow: Raduga. Gutner, Mikhail (ed.). 1937. Antologiia novoi angliiskoi poezii [Anthology of new English poetry]. Leningrad: GIKhL. Kashkin, Ivan and Mikhail Zenkevich (eds.). 1939. Poety Ameriki: XX vek [Poets of America: 20th century]. Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura. Lehmann, John. 1936. “Some Revolutionary Trends in Modern English Poetry. 1930–1935.” International Literature 4: 60–83. Lemann, Dzhon [Lehmann, John]. 1936. “О revoliutsionnykh tendentsiiakh v noveishei angliiskoi poezii (1930–1935)” [Some revolutionary trends in modern English poetry (1930–1935)]. Internatsional’naia literatura 5: 173–184. Oden, Uisten Khiu [Auden, Wystan Hugh]. 1938. “Ispaniya: poema.” Internatsio­ nal’naia literatura 5: 135–136. Oden, Uisten Khiu [Auden, Wystan Hugh]. 1939. “Vechernii chas. Zavyl gudok . . .” Znamia 3: 201–203. Oden, Uisten Khiu [Auden, Wystan Hugh]. 1997. Sobranie stikhotvorenii [Collected Poems]. Translated by Viktor Toporov. Saint-Petersburg: Evraziia. Oden, Uisten Khiu [Auden, Wystan Hugh]. 1998a. Chtenie: Pis’mo: Esse o literature [Reading. Writing: Essays on literature]. Мoscow: Nezavisimaia Gazeta. Oden, Uisten Khiu [Auden, Wystan Hugh]. 1998b. Zastol’nye besedy s Alanom Ansenom [Table Talk with Alan Ansen]. Translated by Gleb Shulpiakov and Mark Dadian. Moscow: Nezavisimaya Gazeta.

304  Elena Ostrovskaya Oden, Uisten Khiu [Auden, Wystan Hugh]. 2003. Labirint [Labyrinth]. Translated by Viacheslav Shestakov. Moscow and Saint-Petesburg: Letnii sad. Oden, Uisten Khiu [Auden, Wystan Hugh]. 2008. Lektsii o Shekspire [Lectures on Shakespeare]. Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Ol’gi Morozovoi. Radek, Karl. 1934. “Sovremennaia mirovaia literatura i zadachi proletarskogo iskusstva.” In Pervyi vsesoiuznyi s’ezd sovetskikh pisatelei 1934: Stenograficheskii otchet, edited by Ivan Luppol, Mark Rosental’ and Sergei Tretiakov, 291– 318. Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo “Khudozhestvennaia literatura.” Roberts, Michael (ed.). 1932. New Signatures: Poems by Several Hands. London: Leonard & Virginia Woolf at The Hogarth Press. Roberts, Michael (ed.). 1933. New Country: Prose and Poetry by the Authors of New Signatures. London: Leonard & Virginia Woolf at The Hogarth Press. Roberts, Michael (ed.). 1936. The Faber Book of Modern Verse. London: Faber & Faber. Sergeev, Andrei. 1997. Omnibus: Al’bom dlia marok. Portrety: O Brodskom: Rasskaziki [Omnibus: Stamp album: Portraits: On Brodskii: Short short stories]. Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie. Volkov, Solomon. 1998a. Dialogi s Iosifom Brodskim [Dialogues with Joseph Brodsky]. Moscow: Nezavisimaia gazeta. Volkov, Solomon. 1998b. Conversations with Joseph Brodsky: A Poet’s Journey Through the Twentieth Century. Translated by Marian Schwartz. New York: Free Press. Volkov, Solomon. 2002. Conversations with Joseph Brodsky: A Poets Journey Through the Twentieth Century. Translated by Marian Schwartz. New York: Free Press. Zverev, Aleksei and Inna Levidova. 1975. Sovremennaia amerikanskaia poeziia [Contemporary American poetry]. Moscow: Progress.

Secondary Literature Beach, Joseph Warren. 1957. The Making of the Auden Canon. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Bloomfield, Barry Cambray, and Edward Mendelson. 1972. W. H. Auden: A Bibliography 1924–1969. 2nd Edn. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Burak, Alexander. 2013a. “The ‘Americanization’ of Russian Life and Literature Through Translations of Hemingway’s Works.” Translation and Interpreting Studies 8 (1): 50–72. Burak, Alexander. 2013b. The Other in Translation: A Case for Comparative Translation Studies. Bloomington, IN: Slavica Publishers. Izzo, David Garret. 2003. W.H. Auden: Encyclopedia. Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland & Company, Inc. Korte, Barbara. 2000. “Flowers for the Picking: Anthologies for Poetry in (British) Literary and Cultural Studies.” In Anthologies of British Poetry: Critical Perspectives from Literary and Cultural Studies, edited by Barbara Korte, Ralf Schneider and Stefanie Lethbridge, 1–32. Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi. Kruzhkov, Grigorii. 2011. “Zametki ob Odene [Some notes on Auden]” In Oden, Uisten Khiu: Stikhi i Esse [Auden, Wystan Hugh: Poems and essays], Inostrannaia literatura 7: 130–188.

Poetic Translation and the Canon 305 Lefevere, André. 1992. Translation, Rewriting and the Manipulation of Literary Fame. London and New York: Routledge. Loseff, Lev. 1984. On the Beneficence of Censorship: Aesopian Language in Modern Russian Literature. München: Otto Sagner. Mendelson, Edward. 1981. Early Auden. New York: Viking Press. Mendelson, Edward. 2000. Later Auden. First Paperback Edition. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux. Safiullina, Nailya. 2009. “Window to the West: From the Collection of Readers’ Letters to the Journal ‘Internatsional’naia literatura.’ ” Slavonica 15 (2): 128–161. Smith, Barbara H. 1991. Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Smith, Gerald Stanton. 2000. D.S. Mirsky: A Russian-English Life, 1890–1939. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Strauss, Jennifer. 1987. “Anthologies and Orthodoxies.”Australian Literary Studies 13 (1): 87–95. Venuti, Lawrence. 2008. “Translation, Interpretation, Canon Formation.” In Translation and the Classic: Identity as Change in the History of Culture, edited by Alexandra Lianeri and Vanda Zajko, 27–50. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

19 Literary Translation, Queer Discourses, and Cultural Transformation Mogutin Translating/ Translating Mogutin Vitaly Chernetsky What ethical and political issues arise when one considers translation in the context of the nascent countercultural queer Russian-language writing? What challenges, from cognitive to aesthetic, does one face when engaging in such translation practices, reaching beyond semantic equivalence and transparent communication? As a site of knowledge production with far-reaching implications for power relations, how does a translated text’s status change when approached from the perspective of generating “opportunities for queer political intervention through [. . .] globalized coalition politics?” As Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé and Martin Manalansan argue, the position occupied by queer sexualities and cultures in our globalized world as a mediating figure between nation and diaspora, home and the state, the local and the global [. . .] has not only been a site of dispossession, it has also been a creative site for queer agency and empowerment. (Cruz-Malavé and Manalansan 2002, 1–2) In what follows, I approach this nexus of related issues through analysis of the role of translation practices in the work of a unique figure in the emergent Russian queer culture of the post-Soviet era, Yaroslav (Slava) Mogutin. It is no run-of-the-mill event when an individual in a national culture— and Russia here is no exception—emerges as a multimedia phenomenon, combining individual specificity with a reaching out to many global currents. Moreover, one usually describes the savvier stars of popular culture in these terms (Madonna being perhaps the most obvious example), not avant-garde writers or artists. Yaroslav (Slava) Mogutin (b. 1974) is a remarkable exception: a poet, essayist, journalist, prose writer, literary translator, photographer, and visual and performance artist (to list just some of his accomplishments) who successfully fashioned a unique identity, beginning at the tender age of 17 and running through successive, ever-more-dazzling reincarnations, in the context of both Russian and

Literary Translation 307 global culture, building upon multiple strategies of self-fashioning and countercultural subversion. In the world of Russian culture of the post-Soviet era, Mogutin stands out for several reasons. Publishing prolifically since the age of seventeen, he quickly established a reputation as a leading, if controversial, representative of “new Russian journalism” and began publishing original poetry and fiction and preparing editions of previously banned authors and texts. Mogutin emerged as Russia’s first “gay” public figure (with the possible exception of Mikhail Kuzmin nearly a century earlier). Out from the very beginning of his career, Mogutin made his sexuality into a central aspect of his creative work. Mogutin’s activity as a cultural producer ended up provoking hostile reactions from the Russian authorities; in 1995, he became the first Russian citizen to be granted asylum in the US on the grounds of persecution due to sexual orientation. In the US, his voice as an original poet and prose writer, as well as a literary translator, continued to mature, and in 2000 he was awarded the Andrei Bely Prize, one of Russia’s most prestigious literary awards. Mogutin’s ascent to fame was truly meteoric. In February 1994, an article in Nezavisimaia gazeta, at the time one of Russia’s most influential newspapers, named him “the best critic writing today.” Yet controversy and trouble were not far behind. On 12 April 1994, Mogutin’s name spilled over from the world of literature and journalism to that of public activism and newsmaking. On this day, together with his partner at the time, the American artist and expatriate Robert Filippini, Mogutin attempted to register the first same-sex marriage in Russia. Although their attempt was rejected by the authorities, the event was picked up by major news media outlets all over the world, and became no less a landmark in the emergence of Russian gays into visibility than the publication a few months earlier of the collected writings of Evgenii Kharitonov (1941–1981), the leading Soviet gay author of the samizdat era, edited and with an introduction by Mogutin. The aesthetics and politics of Mogutin’s early writing, however, display closer affinities not to Kharitonov or Kuzmin but to another author, Eduard Limonov (b. 1943). An important figure in dissident circles in the 1960s—early 1970s, Limonov emigrated to the US in 1974, then to France in 1980, before returning to Russia shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union. While primarily active as a poet prior to emigration, Limonov owes his fame to the autobiographical novel It’s Me, Eddie (Eto ia—Edichka), written in New York in 1976 and published in 1979, and translated into numerous languages, including English in 1983. The book was written as a deliberate “slap-in-your-face” challenge to Russian cultural taboos with its abundant use of cursewords, explicit erotic content, including graphic descriptions of same-sex encounters, and became a scandalous bestseller; the title of its published French translation, Le poète russe préfère les grands nègres (The Russian poet prefers big black men), is particularly telling in this respect. Limonov’s later drift toward

308  Vitaly Chernetsky political radicalism arguably stemmed from his embrace of the punk aesthetics and ethos, but eventually led to such widely condemned activities as explicit support of Serbian militias during the wars in Croatia and Bosnia in the early 1990s, as well as of Abkhazian and Transnistian separatists.1 Mogutin met Limonov at the very beginning of his career as a writer and journalist, on a visit to Paris in 1991; on subsequent trips to France in the early 1990s, he even stayed at Limonov’s apartment. The publishing house Glagol, where Mogutin worked for several years and which published the aforementioned two-volume edition of Kharitonov, was also instrumental in the publication of Limonov’s writings in Russia, beginning with It’s Me, Eddie in 1990. Mogutin published several interviews with Limonov in 1992–1993 and an extended essay on the evolution of the writer’s aesthetics as an afterword to the 1994 edition of Limonov’s novel. . . We Had a Great Era ( . . . U nas byla velikaia epokha, originally published 1987).2 After Mogutin’s emigration to the US, their contacts gradually waned, and they drifted far apart both aesthetically and politically, but Limonov’s influence is crucial for understanding Mogutin’s literary evolution. Although Russia repealed the Stalin-era law criminalizing sodomy (muzhelozhstvo) in May 1993, it was still a very homophobic country in the spring of 1994, when Mogutin and Filippini attempted to register their marriage. As documented by numerous sociological surveys and reports by human rights organizations, homophobia in Russia has been on the rise again in recent years.3 Mogutin’s public actions affirming lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) rights immediately made him a target for harassment by police and other state authorities.4 But true to his peculiar style of self-fashioning, he refused to play it safe. The often controversial views he expressed in his journalistic writing led the state to initiate a criminal case against him, charging him under Article 208, Part 2 (“malicious hooliganism with exceptional cynicism and particular insolence”) and Article 74 (“inflaming social, national, and religious enmity”) of the Russian criminal code. Although represented by one of Russia’s most famous human rights lawyers, Genrikh Padva, Mogutin found his situation increasingly difficult. In March 1995, he left Russia for the US, with an invitation from Columbia University to deliver a series of lectures, and applied for political asylum. His arrival in the US serves as the major divide in Mogutin’s creative biography. Like most new immigrants, he had to reinvent himself, to reaffirm (and in the process, restructure) his identity. In the process, he rapidly evolved both in terms of his personal intellectual and artistic goals. In Russia, he was first and foremost a journalist writing on cultural topics, indeed a major star of post-Soviet “new Russian journalism.” He was only beginning to emerge publicly as a poet. His attempt at registering a same-sex marriage became a landmark event in the history

Literary Translation 309 of Russian LGBT rights movement and drew unprecedented global visibility to the plight of the Russian LGBT community, yet Mogutin has never considered himself a gay activist in the narrow understanding of the term, and has always sought to distance himself from the often petty and cliquish world of “professional gay activists” and from what he saw as the shallow commodified life of the gay ghettos in the large cities of the West. Landing in the middle of New York’s bohemian art world and kaleidoscopically diverse queer culture, Mogutin honed his skills as a keen observer and witty commentator. However, his focus now dramatically shifts, from occasional journalism to more ambitious creative writing projects, in a wide range of genres. Within Mogutin’s professional activities, translation has consistently occupied a prominent place. One can, in fact, argue that the aesthetics of his original in-your-face unapologetic poetic and prose texts developed in part as a project seeking to enact cultural translation of counterculturally inclined gay authors from a number of literary traditions, from Arthur Rimbaud to contemporary American queer writing. His activities as a cultural critic also helped bring to the Russian reading public the work of earlier translators, such as Gennadii Shmakov’s acclaimed translation of James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, one of the key gay-themed literary classics of the twentieth century, which had earlier circulated in samizdat before it was finally published by Glagol in 1993 with a preface coauthored by Mogutin. Many of Mogutin’s Russian-language writings, both his own original texts and translations from English, first saw the light of day in the literary journal Mitin zhurnal, a samizdat publication that transitioned to “aboveground” status in the 1990s but continued to focus on innovative modern and contemporary writing, both by Russian authors and in translation. It was there that Mogutin’s translations of poetry by Allen Ginsberg and prose by William Burroughs and the contemporary American writer Dennis Cooper were first published. Mogutin’s translations thus appeared in a context radically different from the preceding era when, as Brian Baer demonstrated in his article “Translating Queer Texts in Soviet Russia: A Case Study in Productive Censorship,” struggling with the restrictions imposed by the regime resulted in the development of a whole host of creative strategies by such translators as Shmakov, and earlier Mikhail Kuzmin and Ivan Likhachev (Baer 2011). These earlier translators, as Baer has shown, created a “closet canon” (25), giving access to a space where an “alternative interpretive community” (26) could coalesce, enabling a queer reading of many masterpieces of world literature. Mogutin’s translations, by contrast, emerged in an era of unprecedented openness that now, given the increasing restrictions on press freedom and an intensifying climate of homophobia in Russia in recent years, is viewed by many with palpable nostalgia. Mogutin’s translations into Russian, just like his original writings and later his visual arts work, can be seen as a deliberate effort aimed at

310  Vitaly Chernetsky building a vision of queer personhood that is not bound to accomodationist, normalizing, and consumer-oriented strategies. On the contrary, he celebrates the right to be different, to transgress dominant social norms, to give expression to identities and experiences previously voiceless in Russian. Writing as recently as 2007, Christopher Larkosh noted, Despite the growing interest of questions of translation and gender throughout the 1980s and 90s to the present day, the relationship between translation and sexuality, and more specifically those forms of sexuality often considered to be beyond the limits of the normative, has still been given relatively less attention in the field of translation studies. (Larkosh 2007, 66) While an intersectional project between LGBT studies and translation studies is still in its infancy, there have recently emerged a number of important contributions, and in fact, a major international conference titled Queering Translation—Translating the Queer took place in March 2015 at the University of Vienna. Among the pioneers of this emerging intersectional field is the British scholar Keith Harvey, whose influential 1998 article “Translating Camp Talk: Gay Identities and Cultural Transfer” was included in The Translation Studies Reader edited by Lawrence Venuti. In this article, as well as in his later publications, such as his 2003 book Intercultural Movements: American Gay in French Translation, Harvey focuses on a number of challenges posed by literary texts that draw on traditions of self-articulation within the gay community, stemming from a cluster of factors that go beyond close attention to the source text and involve cultural and even autobiographical issues for the translator. These issues include: (a) the existence, nature and visibility of identities and communities predicated upon same-sex object choice in the target culture; (b) the existence or absence of an established gay literature in the target culture; (c) the stated gay objectives (if retrievable) inherent in the undertaking of the translation and the publication of the translation (for example, whether the text is to be part of a gay list of novels); (d) the sexual identity of the translator and his or her relation to a gay subcultural group, its identities, codes and political project. (Harvey 2004, 403) In this article, Harvey focuses specifically on the tradition of “camp talk” (verbal performance including parodic and exaggerated reimaging of stereotypical femininity), which is frequently contrasted to normalizing

Literary Translation 311 behavioral strategies associated with being in the closet or with a desire to blend into the mainstream society. As Harvey demonstrates, camp talk can be used either as a strategy of othering a character in the text or as a defiant strategy of affirmation and resistance by creating “ironic distance around all semiotic practice, constituting devices of ‘defamiliarization,’ ” signaling “a suspicion of all encodings of sincerity.” Additionally, they “reinforce gay solidarity between interlocutors” (407). In his research, he focuses on examples of English to French and French to English translations, where complications arise due to the feature of French culture whereby “gayness—construed as a defining property of a distinct group of human beings—conflicts in France with the philosophy of the universal subject inherited from the Enlightenment” (415). As a result, an additional macro-level challenge is created for rendering such polyvalent, code-blending textual elements. These specific challenges faced by translators are similar to those of displaced/diasporic gay persons in the process of reconstituting their identities, such as those of Filipino gay men in New York described in the work of the anthropologist Martin Manalansan (Manalansan 2004; Cruz-Malavé and Manalansan 2002). In the Slavic context, arguably the best-known example of the challenge of cultural transfer associated with the traditions of camp talk can be found in the work of the Polish writer Michał Witkowski (b. 1975), especially his debut novel Lubiewo (2004), which challenges the normalization and accommodation strategies by revaluation of socialist-era camp talk and behavior of the older generation of Polish gay men. This book presents formidable challenges to the translator, and we are fortunate to have a brilliant English translation of it by William Martin, and, in the East European context, an ambitious translation by the Ukrainian writer and translator Andrii Bondar (pub. 2006), a straight ally of the LGBT community, who basically had to invent a Ukrainian-language campy gay slang as it would have sounded in the 1970s. By comparison, Yurii Chainikov’s 2007 Russian translation of Witkowski’s novel was able to build on the published resources of Russian gay slang, the socalled khabal, but with somewhat uneven results.5 But camp talk and affected parodic performance of femininity does not constitute the only recognizable pattern of gay culture. As Alexandra Berlina convincingly demonstrated in her analysis of the Russian translation of Michael Cunningham’s novel The Hours, even well-meaning Russian translators often struggle with rendering in their texts non-homophobic descriptions of everyday lives of members of the LGBT community. The problems arise already on the level of translating basic vocabulary (see Berlina 2012). It is all the more remarkable, then, that in his translation projects, Mogutin is drawn to the forms of gay culture that blossomed in the West in the years of sexual revolution of the 1960s–1970s, which celebrated newly emphatic but polymorphously non-mainstream masculinity. As I have argued elsewhere, Mogutin’s gender identity is neither

312  Vitaly Chernetsky comfortably hegemonic nor straightforwardly oppositional; his masculinity is a subversive strategic appropriation of a motley assortment of signature traits of many possible masculinities, a quintessentially postmodern open work in Umberto Eco’s (1989) sense. Drifting toward outward visual signs of masculine toughness, Mogutin invests them with a strong erotic charge and combines them at the outset with an unbridled, indulgent potlatch of queerness. As Dmitrii Kuz’min has noted, in Mogutin’s writing “homosexuality for the first time [in the Russian tradition] is victorious, endowed with excessive vitality” as opposed to the previously dominant representation of male “homosexuality as a lack in masculinity or as a refusal of the latter, when masculinity is understood as almost a synonym for vitality” (1997, 158). Mogutin’s choices for translation into Russian are thus celebrations of unbridled sexuality, like Allen Ginsberg’s 1970s poems “Sweet Boy, Gimme Yr Ass” and “Come All Ye Brave Boys,” or William Burroughs’s acerbic, contrarian essays “Women: A Biological Mistake?” and “Sexual Conditioning.” They form a continuum with his own original writings of similar style and seek to nourish an unashamed discourse celebrating sexuality in Russian, smashing the strictures of prudery. The texts thus come across as far more transgressive in Russian than they were in English at the time of their writing due to the different history of discourse about sex and sexuality in the two cultures; as a result, in Mogutin’s rendition, Ginsberg’s “Sweet Boy” reads not so much as a sex-positive text with the cadences of the Song of Songs than as a Maiakovskii- or Rimbaud-style slap in the face of public taste and, for all intents and purposes, deliberately so. This is partly because the Russian words for genitalia retain to this day considerably more shock value than their English counterparts (thus Ginsberg’s already defiant “prick shaft delicate” becomes in Mogutin’s translation an even more in-your-face “stvol khuia nezhnyi”). Most importantly, Mogutin succeeds in rendering the tone of Ginsberg’s poem as both lyrical and conversational, aggressively masculine and tender. Mogutin’s practices of queer translation illustrate what William Spurlin, in his introduction to the recent special issue of Comparative Literature Studies on queer translation, describes, building on an earlier argument by Lawrence Venuti, as the ability of the translated text to continue to accrue [. . .]. meanings and values that may differ from those invested in the source text, expose translation not only as a socially mediated and ideologically constructed practice, but also one that is potentially dissident and resistant to unimpeded correspondence between languages. (Spurlin 2014, 202) In his contribution to this special issue, Aarón Lacayo calls for developing a “queer mode of translation [. . .] premised on its approach to the text as a body, that is, on a respect both for this foreign body in all its

Literary Translation 313 contours and for the foreign distance marking one language from the other.” For Lacayo, [t]o consider an ethics of translation as an aesthetics of the erotic is to envision the act of translation as an alluring caress of the interval. Such allure is both a simultaneous embrace and an abandon. The act of translation gestures to the variegated forms of abandon: relinquishing, indulging, reveling. It is in this way, invoking Irigaray, that translation is both a freedom and an attraction, a separation and an alliance. It is a caress always left ajar, always open to an outside, with the force to bring forth aesthetic possibilities of the new. (Lacayo 2014, 228) I would argue that Mogutin’s translation of Ginsberg’s 1975 poem “Come All Ye Brave Boys” offers a particularly insightful instance of the kind of approach to translation described by Lacayo. Mogutin registered the celebratory biblical overtones present elsewhere in Ginsberg’s writing (for instance, in “Sweet Boy”) and transformed this particular poem, which in English is a rhymed and somewhat regularly metered humorous text more reminiscent of Elizabethan-era bawdy poetry that could have come from the pen of someone like Christopher Marlowe, into a Whitmanesque free-verse hymn: Come all you young men that proudly display Your torsos to the Sun on upper Broadway Come sweet hearties so mighty with girls So lithe and naked to kiss their gold curls Come beautiful boys with breasts bright gold Lie down in bed with me ere ye grow old. . . Come sweet delicate strong minded men I’II take you thru graveyards & kiss you again [Siuda, vy vse, molodye muzhchiny gordo demonstriruiushchie Solntsu svoi torsy na Verkhnem Brodvee Siuda, milye koreshi takie mogushchestvennye s devchonkami Takie gibkie i obnazhennye tseluiushchie ikh zolotye lokony Siuda, velikolepnye parni s chreslami iz iarkogo zolota Lozhites ‘so mnoi v krovat’ pokuda ne postareli. . . Siuda, milye khrupkie muzhchiny s krepkimi mozgami Ia provedu vas cherez pogosty i potseluiu opiat] (Ginsberg 2006, 645–646; Ginsberg 1998) In his translation, Mogutin for the most part closely follows the vocabulary and syntax of the original, yet continuously plays with the tone and style, for instance by introducing the Church Slavonicism chresla [hips, thighs] where the original speaks of breasts (thereby anticipating

314  Vitaly Chernetsky the text’s upcoming shift of attention from torsos to thighs) and by translating “graveyards” with a word that likewise carries historical and religious overtones, pogosty, yet rendering the stylistically neutral “strong minded” with a deliberately coarse phrase “s krepkimi mozgami” (literally, ‘with tough brains’). While he is quite skilled at metered and rhymed poetry, here Mogutin chooses not to render the alliterations and rhyme of the original, but builds instead a poem that references the Whitmanesque style prominent in other works by Ginsberg, thereby creating a text that is engaged in a more complex dialogue with the larger œuvre he translates. A free-verse translation of what is a rhymed text in another language is a deliberate, provocative violation of established Russian translation practices, which more often than not opt for rhyming even unrhymed original poetry. Through this gesture, Mogutin’s text enters a polysemic dialogue with the lengthy and rich tradition of translating Whitman into Russian that began with Turgenev’s pioneering efforts in the 1870s, continued by, among others, a leading Symbolist poet, Konstantin Bal’mont, and especially through the efforts of Kornei Chukovskii, a prominent Russian critic, children’s author, and translation theorist, for whom translating Whitman became a lifelong passion and who helped, with his translations, establish an accepted mode for free verse to exist within Russian literary discourse.6 For a long time, in contrast with many other European poetic traditions, modern Russian-language poetry was strongly resistant to free verse, and Chukovskii’s influential translations, begun in the late 1800s and continuing through the late 1960s, arguably became the first major crack in this seemingly unbreachable wall (see Chukovskii 1969). At the same time, these translations, although consistently de-eroticized, still provided, albeit in a coded, veiled fashion, a Russian-language expression to Whitman’s palpable homoeroticism—even if it was consistently explained away in Soviet-era publications as universal love or sympathy for the proletariat (see, for instance, Chukovskii 1955).7 The selection of Ginsberg’s poems in Mogutin’s translation emerges as indeed an ethical affirmation of, and an erotic tribute to, the themes and diction of the American author, highlighting Ginsberg’s homage to, and development of, Whitman’s homoeroticism. When Mogutin moved to New York City in 1995, he had to rethink and reinvent his public persona for a different context, much like the Filipino diasporic gays studied by Manalansan. In fact, he became a pioneer and a documenter of a new Russo-American queer identity that has since been claimed on a greater scale by a new generation of lesbian and gay refugees from Russia and other post-Soviet nations—an identity that interrogates the presuppositions of what it means to be Russian, to be American, to be gay or queer, and numerous other identity markers. This resulted in Mogutin staking out and articulating two related but independent projects: a Russophone one, aimed at his Russian-language readers both in Russia and globally, and a globalized one (primarily, but not exclusively, Anglophone). Thus the process of translation of his

Literary Translation 315 Russian-language texts into English, by the author himself, individually or in collaboration with others, or by other translators, needed to take into account the different contexts in which his texts would operate in English. Being seen as a spokesperson of a new post-Soviet-Russian queer culture, or at least of a segment of it, entailed very different things when aimed at different audiences. The author and his translators had to take into account the different implications in the new context of his public role as a poet, and more broadly of a creative person who is openly gay, and more specifically as a diasporic/exiled Russian. His creative endeavors across many genres paid off; in addition to the growing recognition of his work in Russia, he was seen in the New York art world by the early 2000s as “Russia’s biggest export,” as proclaimed on the cover of the February-March 2002 issue of the glossy magazine Index. Mogutin’s project of self-fashioning involved creating a striking, easily recognizable visual persona, and an increasing shift from verbal to visual arts over the past decade. Yet recently he returned to the literary side of his creative self, bringing out a volume of selected writings in English translation, Food Chain (2014). The work of multiple translators, albeit often extensively revised by the author himself, the book comes across as a sui generis autobiographical statement. Mogutin readily acknowledges in interviews that the darkest pages of his writing are often a form of self-therapy, a product of exorcising his personal traumas and demons. All his major texts are, as it were, framed fragments of “life writing” whose composition was triggered by particular tragic events; this volume includes a story stemming from the news of the death of an old acquaintance in Moscow, “The Death of Misha Beautiful,” as well as by far the darkest of his prose texts, “Bloody Mess,” recounting a chilling sexual encounter with a sadomasochistically inclined psychoanalyst. Over the course of the late 1990s to early 2000s, the tone of Mogutin’s writing grew much darker, and the emotionality heightened. His texts from this period evidence an increasing debt to surrealist “automatic writing” and the influence of the spontaneous long phrases of Ginsberg’s Howl. In these works, Mogutin continues his journey of exploring his self and the world. His texts introduce ever-new themes and locales into Russian writing, in a tireless project involving the cognitive mapping of sexuality and postmodern subjectivity. While written in Russian, his poetry and fiction reference the world far beyond the established domain of Russian literature. Still, Mogutin returns to interrogations of Russianness and masculinity in both life and art, sometimes first and foremost to shock, but more often for a reckoning, a working through of the traumas of identification. Increasingly, though, the poet-rebel morphs into a poet-philosopher. Having followed in his project of artistic practice the transgressive paths of Marlowe and Rimbaud, Mogutin, beginning in the early 2000s, increasingly sounds like a younger colleague of Walt Whitman, his later writing becoming a latter-day incarnation of Whitman’s “I heard it was charged against me that I sought to destroy institutions,/

316  Vitaly Chernetsky But really I am neither for nor against institutions/(What indeed have I in common with them? or what with the destruction of them?),” complete with the establishment of “the dear love of comrades” (Whitman 1954, 123). One of the clearest examples of this mode can be found in the title poem of Mogutin’s 2004 collection Deklaratsiia nezavisimosti [A declaration of independence] (Mogutin 2004, 41–42), which in its complex dialogue with the American poetic tradition reaches back to Whitman’s foundational texts.8 In discussing translating Mogutin into English and the challenges it presents, I would like to highlight two examples. One is the “signature” text of his early period, “The Army Elegy” (“Armeiskaia elegiia,” originally written in 1990), which was translated by me in collaboration with Mogutin himself. The poem was famous for having provoked outrage and even walkouts among “respectable” Russian audiences at group poetic readings by its very first line, “Zapakh soldatskogo khuia ni s chem ne sravnitsia . . .” As no word for penis in contemporary English carries a transgressive charge comparable to the Russian “khui,” we settled in our translation on a more matter of fact “The scent of a soldier’s cock is beyond comparison . . .”—a much less shocking statement given the history of modern English-language writing. What we sought as the paramount task in producing our English translation, however, was to retain and represent the paradoxical mix of lyrical sentiment and in-yourface language. Thus, in the process of our work on the text, we chose on several occasions to include English words that could be perceived as shocking or transgressive; for instance, in the fifth stanza of the poem we replaced, in the final version of our translation, the word “queers” with “faggots” as a rendition of the word pidory in the original Russian. In this way, while one instance of transgressive vocabulary use was sacrificed, the overall transgressive intent was still present in the resulting English text, which otherwise remained close to the original Russian, including reproducing the meter.9 The other example comes from the poem “Esli by ia byl amerikantsem” (Mogutin 1997, 33), co-translated by Mogutin and Dmitry Gelfand as “If I Were an American” (Mogutin 2014, 35). Here, the translators opt to alter the text considerably while preserving the rhyme scheme and, of course, the in-your-face tone: Ia by emu govoril: “Ei, Rashin, Pochemu ty vnutri dereviashin?!” Ia by krichal emu: “Ei, russkii! Pochemy ty takoi v zhopve uzkii?!” [I’d tell him, “Hey, russkie, Why are you wooden on the inside?” I’d yell at him, “Hey, Russian! Why are you so tight-assed?”]

Literary Translation 317 I’d tell him: HEY, RUSKY, WHY ARE YOU SO HUSKY? I’d yell at him: HEY, RUSSIAN, SHOW ME YOUR PINKO COMMIE FAG FASHION! In the process of translation, the vocabulary of ironic insults was changed radically, but both the text’s overall aesthetics and the specific communicative message are successfully conveyed to a new audience. Overall, Mogutin’s translation projects, whether from English into Russian or from Russian into English, evidence consistency and continuity over the course of his now quarter-century long literary career. His paramount goal is to make the text a hard-hitting challenge to his audience’s preconceived notions and sensibilities—literature as an instrument of freedom—yet this challenge is combined with the challenge of reintroducing the tender and the lyrical, the Maiakovskian “babochka poetinogo serdtsa” [the butterfly of a poet’s heart], hoping to enact a paradigm shift in the many different cultural milieux in which he operates. As is common in the practice of self-translation, Mogutin gives himself a freer hand in translating his own Russian-language works into English in order to generate maximum functional equivalence with the Russian originals; however, it would be a mistake to view these efforts simply as a loose rewriting in another language. As Aurelia Klimkiewicz notes, “self-translation [is] a two-directional circulation: first, from inner to external speech (from the self to the other) and then from one language into another inside the divided consciousness (from the self to the self).” This is a particularly fraught process for bilingual displaced/exile authors like Mogutin: “a powerful means of inscribing the self in a new language and environment [. . .]. self-translation tells the story of becoming the other as a painful, ongoing and fully resistant process”(Klimkiewicz 2013, 192, 193).10 Most of Mogutin’s self-translations are, however, produced in collaboration with others. This additional dimension results in a productive tension that can be viewed as an instance of Lacayo’s vision of queer translation as an embodied practice that both separates and communicates, as the encounter of texts that is “a porous embrace [and] a call and response of attraction” (Lacayo 2014, 228). Somewhat paradoxically, this very individualist writer has become a major contributor, especially through his translation efforts, to building a Russian gay community through a more multifaceted image of Russia in the global gay community, and thereby answering the call of Keith Harvey’s essay “Gay Community, Gay Identity, and the Translated Text”: Translated literature occupies a special place within the space of literature for gay readers in that translated texts can suggest models of otherness that can be used in processes of internal identity formation and imagined community projection. Translations can achieve this

318  Vitaly Chernetsky through their subject matter itself, if this presents the reader with explicit accounts of homosexual experience and struggle. But perhaps just as important is the way in which the presence of translatedness in a target culture provides readers who are working at a skew with dominant culture norms the space in which their difference can be worked out as a positive cultural attribute. (Harvey 2000, 159) As a result, Mogutin’s translation practices can be viewed as a thoughtful and productive project of resisting assimilation and building a stronger, more resilient self as a representative of a community that has been struggling with discrimination for far too long. It becomes, ultimately, an act of healing: “translation works as an anchor able to ground the self in the middle of instability. This does not imply a reconstituted totality or a reconquered center, but rather the possibility of making sense of experience according to the precise living moment” (Klimkiewicz 2013, 194).

Notes 1 For more on Limonov, see Carrère 2014 and Ryan-Hayes 1993. 2 See Mogutin 2001, 293–336; Mogutin 1994. 3 The worsening trend began in the early 2000s and has especially accelerated since the passing of the law banning “propaganda of homosexuality” in 2013. See, for instance, the annual reports by ILGA-Europe (www. ilga-europe.org/rainboweurope, accessed 1 December 2016) and License to Harm: Violence and Harassment Against LGBT People and Activists in Russia (2014) by Human Rights Watch (www.hrw.org/reports/2014/12/15/ license-harm, accessed 1 December 2016). 4 See Mogutin 1995. 5 See Witkowski 2005 (released 2004); Vitkovs’kyi 2006; Vitkovskii 2007; and Witkowski 2011. For a classic study of Soviet-era Russian gay slang, see Kozlovskii 1986. 6 For more on Chukovskii, see Viugin’s, Borisenko’s, and Khotimsky’s chapters in the present volume. 7 For a close reading of the evolution of Chukovskii’s approaches to Whitman that, along with other topics, highlights the problem of rendering Whitman’s sensuality in Russian, see Scherr 2009. 8 English trans. by Vitaly Chernetsky in Mogutin 2014, 113–114. 9 “Armeiskaia elegiia,” Mogutin 1997, 70–71; “Army Elegy,” translated by Vitaly Chernetsky and the author, in Moss 1997, 400. 10 For recent studies of self-translation, see especially Hokenson and Munson 2007 and Cordingley 2013; specifically in relation to poetry, see Casanova 2004.

References Baer, Brian James. 2011. “Translating Queer Texts in Soviet Russia: A Case Study in Productive Censorship.” Translation Studies 4 (1): 21–40. Berlina, Alexandra. 2012. “Homosexuality in the Russian Translation of ‘The Hours.’ ” Sexuality & Culture 16 (4): 449–466.

Literary Translation 319 Carrère, Emmanuel. 2014. Limonov. Translated by John Lambert. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Casanova, Jean-Yves. 2004. “Un autre dans le miroir (Traduction et autotraduction).” In Traduction & Poésie, edited by Inês Oseki-Dépré, 51–59. Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose. Chukovskii, Kornei. 1955. “Uolt Uitmen.” In Walt Whitman. List’ia travy [Leaves of grass]. Moscow:, 3-8 GIKhL. Chukovskii, Kornei. 1969. Moi Uitmen: Ocherki o zhizni i tvorchestve; izbrannye perevody iz “List’ev travy” [My Whitman: Sketches on life and creative activity; Selected translations from ‘Leaves of Grass’]. 2nd expanded Edn. Moscow: Progress. Cordingley, Anthony (ed.). 2013. Self-translation: Brokering Originality in Hybrid Culture. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Cruz-Malavé, Arnaldo and Martin F. Manalansan IV (eds.). 2002. Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism. New York: New York University Press. Eco, Umberto. 1989. The Open Work. Translated by Anna Cancogni. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Ginsberg, Allen. 1998. “Sladkii mal‘chik i drugie stikhotvoreniia” [Sweet boy and other poems]. Translated by Yaroslav Mogutin. Mitin zhurnal 56: 193–197. Ginsberg, Allen. 2004. “Translating Camp Talk: Gay Identities and Cultural Transfer.” In The Translation Studies Reader, 2nd Edn., edited by Lawrence Venuti, 402–422. New York: Routledge. Ginsberg, Allen. 2006. Collected Poems 1947–1997. New York: HarperCollins. Harvey, Keith. 2000. “Gay Community, Gay Identity and the Translated Text.” TTR: traduction, terminologie, rédaction 13 (1): 137–165. Harvey, Keith. 2004. “Translating Camp Talk: Gay Identities and Cultural Transfer,” in The Translation Studies Reader, 2nd ed., edited by Lawrence Venuti, 402–22. New York: Routledge. Hokenson, Jan Walsh and Marcella Munson. 2007. The Bilingual Text: History and Theory of Literary Self-Translation. Manchester: St. Jerome. Klimkiewicz, Aurelia. 2013. “Self-translation as Broken Narrativity: Towards an Understanding of the Self’s Multilingual Dialogue.” In Self-translation: Brokering Originality in Hybrid Culture, edited by Anthony Cordingley, 189–201. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Kozlovskii, Vladimir. 1986. Argo russkoi gomoseksual’noi subkul’tury [The argot of Russian homosexual subculture]. Benson, VT: Chalidze Publications. Kuz‘min, Dmitrii. 1997. “Sluchai poeta Mogutina” [The Case of the Poet Mogutin]. In Uprazhneniia dlia iazyka, edited by Yaroslav Mogutin, 157–160. New York: s.n. Lacayo, Aarón. 2014. “A Queer and Embodied Translation: Ethics of Difference and Erotics of Distance.” Comparative Literature Studies 51 (2): 215–230. Larkosh, Cristopher. 2007. “The Translator’s Closet: Editing Sexualities in Argentine Literary Culture.” TTR: traduction, terminologie, rédaction 20 (2): 63–88. Manalansan, Martin F., IV. 2004. Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora. Durham: Duke University Press. Mogutin, Slava. 2014. Food Chain. New York: ITNA Press. Mogutin, Yaroslav. 1994. “Vospominaniia russkogo panka, ili avtoportret bandita v molodosti” [Memoirs of a Russian punk, or self-portrait of a bandit as

320  Vitaly Chernetsky a young man]. In . . . .U nas byla velikaia epokha, edited by Eduard Limonov, 158–187. Moscow: Nezavisimyi al’manakh “Konets veka,” knizhnoe prilozhenie. Mogutin, Yaroslav. 1995. “Invitation to a Beheading.” Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review 2 (4): 31–36. Mogutin, Yaroslav. 1997. Uprazhneniia dlia iazyka [Exercises for the tongue]. New York: s.n. Mogutin, Yaroslav. 2001. 30 interv’iu [30 interviews]. St. Petersburg: Limbus Press. Mogutin, Yaroslav. 2004. Deklaratsiia nezavisimosti [A declaration of independence]. Tver‘: Kolonna. Moss, Kevin (ed.). 1997. Out of the Blue: Russia’s Hidden Gay Literature. San Francisco: Gay Sunshine Press. Ryan-Hayes, Karen. 1993. “Limonov’s ‘It’s Me, Eddie’ and the Autobiographical Mode.” The Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies 1004 (March): 1–37. Scherr, Barry P. 2009. “Čukovskij’s Whitmans.” Russian Literature 56 (1): 65–98. Spurlin, William J. 2014. “The Gender and Queer Politics of Translation: New Approaches.” Comparative Literature Studies 51 (2): 201–214. Vitkovskii, Mikhal [Witkowski, Michał]. 2007. Liubievo. Translated by Iurii Chainikov. Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie. Vitkovs’kyi, Mikhal [Witkowski, Michał]. 2006. Khtyvnia. Translated by Andrii Bondar. Kyiv: Nora-Druk. Whitman, Walt. 1954. Leaves of Grass. New York: Signet Classic/New American Library. Witkowski, Michał. 2005. Lubiewo. Cracow: Ha!art. Witkowski, Michał. 2011. Lovetown. Translated by William Martin. London: Portobello Books.

20 Battling around the Exception A Stateless “Russian” Writer and His Translation in Today’s Estonia Daniele Monticelli and Eneken Laanes

The Russian context we are going to consider in what follows is that of the Russian diaspora in the former Soviet republics. More precisely, we will focus on the case of contemporary Estonia where the Russianspeaking minority makes up a quarter of the population and has been a challenging and divisive national issue ever since the country recovered its independence in 1991.1 The dominant attitudes of the Estonian political elites and the Russian community itself toward national relations are often characterized by clear-cut understandings of linguistic and cultural identity, which have taken a dramatically trivializing turn in recent years: from the Bronze Soldier conflict2 through the Russo-Georgian war of 2008 to the ongoing Ukrainian crisis, the Estonian Russian–speaking community is increasingly squeezed between the mistrustful attitudes of Estonian right-wing politicians, who view the community as the potential fifth column of Putin’s neo-imperialist ambitions, and the powerful machine of Russian propaganda, which represents it as the victim of local nationalism. These reductive images are far removed from the fluid situation on the ground. The hypothesis we would like to develop and explore in what follows is that the translation into Estonian and the reception of contemporary Estonian authors writing in Russian is a privileged place for contesting the stereotypical self-descriptions and hetero-descriptions of the Russian-speaking community, exposing and deconstructing the shortcomings of identity politics on both sides. Our case study is built around the figure of the novelist Andrei Ivanov, and this is done for various reasons. First of all, Ivanov has a pre-eminent position among contemporary Estonian authors writing in Russian and has earned an international reputation. Second, his emergence in recent years has coincided with the period noted earlier, with his first short story appearing in 2007, immediately after the Bronze Soldier riots in Tallinn. Finally and most importantly, his work and persona have generated a broad and distinctly symptomatic debate on identitarian categories among scholars, literary critics, and the Estonian public.

322  Daniele Monticelli and Eneken Laanes Andrei Ivanov was born in Tallinn in 1971 into a family of post-WWII Russian immigrants. After the country recovered its independence, he ended up with an “alien’s passport” (commonly known as the “gray passport” in Estonia) along with one-third of all Estonian population officially described as “stateless individuals.”3 Ivanov studied Russian philology at Tallinn Pedagogical University and worked in Tallinn as a stoker and a security guard. In the second half of the 1990s, he immigrated to Denmark and lived for seven years in various Scandinavian countries. Since 2004, he has lived as a full-time writer in Tallinn. His biography provides important raw material for his fiction, which focuses on existential and social alienation, estrangement, and foreignness (Jüristo 2014), mainly played out in two different contexts. The first of these is late-Soviet and post-Soviet Estonia, of which Ivanov draws a pitiless picture, exposing the hidden solidarity between the rebirth of Estonian identity politics and neoliberal capitalism. At the same time, he ridicules the attempts of the local Russian community to make sense of its new strangeness in Estonia by holding on to an anachronistic spatiotemporal belonging.4 Here is a passage from his novel Peotäis põrmu [A handful of dust]: It’s easier to be a Muslim than a Russian Estonian! You have to do so much! Have to believe so many things! And give up so many things! If you’re Russian you have to go to the Russian Drama Theatre. You have to admire Russian culture. You have to celebrate the New Year at the right time. Eleven o’clock!5 Together with Russia! Are you a Russian or not, damn it?! You have to follow what is happening in Russia, watch the Olympics and count the medals won. You have to read Pelevin, Prokhanov, Prilepin, and another one from behind the baseboard. . . In football tournaments you should cheer for Russia and against Estonia. You must scream “Ros-si-ia-a-a!” through a megaphone. You must lay flowers on the monument to the fallen. . . . . You have to curse Estonian laws. You must drink and throw up with the others! You must never fail to note that Russians are oppressed. You are obliged to notice it. If you do not, then you are no longer a Russian, since Russians are oppressed, and if you no longer feel that you are oppressed, you have gradually ceased to be a Russian. (2011b, 153)6 The second line of Ivanov’s fiction concentrates on the precarious existence of migrants in contemporary Europe. Representing life in Danish asylum camps and hippie communes, Ivanov turns the topos into

Battling around the Exception 323 “nowhere” (Grigoreva 2011) and gives a picture of humanity divested of any identitarian security, a polymorphic life, whose anti-hero is Hanuman, the Indian trickster and demigod protagonist of his novel Puteshestvie Hanumana na Lolland [Hanuman’s journey to Lolland].7

Partaking of the Sensible: The (Non)Place of Ivanov and His Translation in Estonian Literature Before approaching the translation of Ivanov’s work into Estonian and its local reception by critics and the public, it is important to draw a full picture of the transnational character of Ivanov’s work as reflected first in its publishing history. The different editions of his books reveal an unusually multifarious publishing history, which includes Russian-language publishers in Estonia, Russian publishers, Estonian publishers, Estonian and Russian literary journals, and literary journals of the Russian diaspora in the US. Most of his novels were first published in Russian in Tallinn, and some of them were later republished in Moscow. His first texts were published in a Russian émigré journal in New York in 2007 and 2008. His first novel Puteshestvie Hanumana na Lolland [Hanuman’s journey to Lolland] came off a Russian press in Tallinn in 2009 only to land on the shortlist of the Russian Booker prize, before being republished in Moscow. In the same year, the first Estonian translation of his work was published. However, there is also a text that was originally published in Estonian, directly translated from the Russian manuscript.8 This publishing history diverges strongly from that of the other Russian-Estonian authors who had earlier been visible in the Estonian cultural field as public figures but whose work had been available only in Russian. This clear language divide is also the reason why the notion of migrant literature was practically absent from Estonian literary criticism before Ivanov.9 Ivanov’s fiction, which is originally written in Russian but addresses the most urgent questions of Estonia’s multi-ethnic society with a talent that is impossible to ignore, thus precipitated a movement toward a more crosscultural, transnational, and translinguistic understanding of local literature.10 Initially, this variety of publishing patterns and the lack of analytical tools generated a taxonomic puzzle (Jüristo 2014) for Estonian literary critics trying to position Ivanov inside or outside the boundaries of what we could define as, following Jacques Rancière (2004), “the partition of the sensible” [partage du sensible] in the Estonian literary field, meaning the consensual, silently, and unquestioningly accepted establishment of its boundaries (what is and what is not “Estonian literature”) and the legitimate distribution of parts and positions within them (who is who in “Estonian literature”). Ivanov has thus been variously described in reviews as an “Estonian writer” (eesti kirjanik, e.g., Afanasjev 2012), a “Russian writer” (vene kirjanik, e.g., Kulli 2014) or even a “domesticated

324  Daniele Monticelli and Eneken Laanes Russian” (“kodustatud” venelane, Martson 2010), a “Russian-Estonian writer” (eestivene kirjanik, e.g., Lotman 2012), an “Estonian Russian– language writer” (Eesti venekeelne kirjanik, e.g., Kotjuh 2013), a “Russian writer of Estonia” (Eesti vene kirjanik, e.g., Tigasson 2012; Laasik 2012), a “Russian-Baltic writer” (baltivene kirjanik, Laukkonen 2012) and a “world literature author” (maailmakirjanduse autor—e.g., Sibrits 2013). Particularly interesting from this point of view is the heated debate around Ivanov’s novel Peotäis põrmu [A handful of dust], which focuses on the issue of translation. The novel was published in 2011 in Estonian and was translated directly from the Russian manuscript, but was not published in Russian until 2014.11 The title page of the Estonian book presents it as a “translation from Russian” but does not even report the “original” Russian title. A debate among critics, literary scholars, and the public burst out in Estonian newspapers and magazines when the novel was not nominated for the most important literary prize in Estonia, awarded by the Cultural Endowment of Estonia, because it could not possibly be included in any of its categories. It did not fit into the category of original fiction because it was a translation, nor into the category of Estonian literature written in Russian12 because the Russian original was unpublished, nor into literary translations because the original was “missing.” In Rancière’s terms, we can say that the institutionalization of the consensual partition of the sensible in the Estonian literary field makes Ivanov’s work invisible, as evidenced by its exclusion from the competition for the literary awards (Laanes 2012).13 While the discussion thus clearly shows that the Estonian version of Ivanov’s novel seems to escape the binaries of original/translation and Estonian/Russian that could warrant unquestionable consensus regarding its inclusion/exclusion, its “invisibility” in terms of these categories remains so obtrusive that it cannot go unnoticed. The notion of “exception” as elaborated by Giorgio Agamben (1998, 2004, 2005) offers us the theoretical instruments needed to understand this paradoxical situation. Agamben uses the term exception [eccezione] to characterize, both from a political and a philosophical point of view, a state of undecidability about the inclusion or exclusion of something in or from a given political, social, cultural, or literary space. Grounded as it is in the logic of the neither/nor or, equivalently, the both/and, as opposed to the clear-cut binary alternatives of either/or, the exception coincides with a paradoxical threshold of inclusive exclusion between the inside and outside of any existing category (Agamben 2005, 290). Ivanov’s novel is in this respect not simply something that translation scholars would call a “pseudotranslation” or a “pseudo-original,” but rather it marks the very impossibility of distinguishing between original and translation, mirroring the undecidable position of its author in the Estonian literary field

Battling around the Exception 325 and, more generally, cultural and social space. As Agamben observes in set-theoretical terms, the exception is simultaneously “what cannot be a member of the whole in which it is always already included” and “what cannot be included in the whole of which it is a member” (Agamben 1998, 25). It is not just a matter of separation that would sanction once and for all the exclusion of a completely foreign and irrelevant outside. On the contrary, the status and destiny of the exception is inextricably related to that of the internal political, social, cultural, or literary space that is constituted through its exclusion: securing its grip on the liminal space of indeterminacy and undecidability becomes for the latter a vital but problematic task whose results never cease to be questionable and open to revision. The Estonian reception of Peotäis põrmu [A handful of dust] thus turned into a literary and political battle around the exception, where the attempt to univocally determine the degree of originality or derivativeness of the Estonian version of the novel became a means of reaffirming or contesting the distribution of the sensible in the Estonian literary field and, more generally, the hegemonic understandings of linguistic and cultural identity. The contesting critics generally tried to affirm the originality of the Estonian version of the novel as a way of extending the definitional scope of Estonian literature. For instance Mari Peegel, a cultural critic at the important daily Eesti Päevaleht,14 argued that “[t]he language of the manuscript shows this to be a translation, but as it has never previously been published in Russian, the edition by Varrak [the Estonian Publisher] is the first edition, making it an original Estonian work.” (Peegel 2012). Peegel interestingly suggests that one way to achieve the solution she is advocating may be to recognize the translator as a “coauthor” of the Estonian version of the novel, concluding that “Estonian literature could be defined as ‘literature written in Estonia’ ” (Peegel 2012). Replacing the cultural and linguistic boundary with a geographical one means the indeterminacy of Ivanov’s and his novel’s position is eventually eliminated and the exception is recuperated into the internal space—the Estonian literary field, where, according to Peegel’s proposal, “Estonian literature written in Russian” becomes a fully acknowledged part of “Estonian literature.” Some critics, however, insisted on the need to keep to existing definitions and separations. Among them was Rebekka Lotman, chair of the jury for the literary prizes of the Estonian Cultural Endowment. She justified the decision of the jury to exclude Peotäis põrmu [A handful of dust] by saying that “originals and translations are fundamentally different text types.” The Estonian version of Ivanov’s novel is thus univocally labeled as a “translation,” with the immediate consequence that “it cannot possibly be taken into consideration in the category of originals” (Lotman

326  Daniele Monticelli and Eneken Laanes 2012). This eventually brings Lotman to rule out Ivanov’s exception by reaffirming the dominant taxonomic criteria of inclusion and exclusion: Defining Estonian literature by language is not something that could be seen as discriminatory against any ethnic group. Literature written in Estonia can in general be divided into Estonian literature and Estonian-Russian literature, where the first is written in Estonian and the second in Russian. For the first the Cultural Endowment of Estonia has the prizes for Estonian literature, for the second the prize for Russian-language authors. [. . . .] (Lotman 2012) These brief examples are particularly straightforward illustrations of the fundamental terms of the debate that developed in the dozens of articles in newspaper and cultural journals that contributed to the battle around Ivanov’s and his novel’s exception. What the different positions in the debate seem to share is a certain uneasiness, even anxiety, toward that area of indeterminacy that Ivanov and his novel open between originality and derivativeness (the issue of translation), which has a problematizing impact on the notion of “Estonian literature” and, more generally, on linguistic, cultural, and social identities.

A Right to the Exception It is at this point interesting to turn to Ivanov and his own attitude toward the position of himself and his work in Estonian society and literature. This is a question journalists almost never fail to raise in interviews with Ivanov in the Estonian press—another sign of the identitarian uncertainties and anxiety described earlier. Ivanov generally refuses to satisfy the wishes of the Estonian public to get from him a clear statement of selfpositioning and belonging. For instance, in an interview for the daily Postimees, he simply answers the journalist who asks him whether he is an Estonian author or not: “I do not know. Really” (Sibrits 2013). In another interview with the major Estonian weekly Eesti Ekspress, while discussing the relevance of a writer’s name and origins for his success in a given cultural and linguistic setting, Ivanov himself asks the journalist, “What does it matter what your name is and where you are from?” (Afanasjev 2012). Elsewhere, he claims that he feels himself in Estonia, “just like everywhere else in the world, as a simple mortal being” (Kulli 2014). Instead of making a choice between the available alternatives and assuming a position, Ivanov seems to conceptualize himself and, possibly, the Russian-Estonian community as a whole in the anti-identitarian terms of a universal existential condition that he describes as “dwelling in a refugee transit camp” and “living in emigration in respect of one’s own past” (Laasik 2012). In contrast to what we described earlier as a

Battling around the Exception 327 battle around the exception aimed at getting rid of the indeterminacy of Ivanov’s position and that of his work in Estonian society and literature, the writer himself affirms his wish to preserve the exception from being erased by any existing criteria for the assignment and denial of identifying categories. While this is usually understood by critics as a refusal of civil engagement in favor of existential desolation,15 a reference to Agamben helps us, once again, to cast a different light on Ivanov’s position: “[o]nly in a world,” claims the philosopher, “in which the citizen has been able to recognise the refugee that he or she is—only in such a world is the political survival of humankind today thinkable” (Agamben 2000, 26). Agamben raises here the question of a possible politics to come, rethinking community outside those identitarian categories—paradigmatically illustrated by the “citizen” of the quoted passage—which unavoidably (re)generate again and again new exclusions and marginalizations. Similarly, Ivanov turns his exceptional stateless condition into a sign of his own vision of states and social systems. In his first short novel Zola [Ash], the gray passport is still described as a symbol of alienation and is compared to a disease people get infected with from biting, like in the classic scenario of zombie movies. However, the protagonist already accepts this new status with a challenging attitude and forges his existence as a “Russian Balt” in the terms of an impossible identity: That was the time when the idea of a Russian Balt was born in my mind. A person who is proud of what he lacks. Of what he does not even want to possess. Of what he has chosen not to possess. Who has chosen that he is not. Who is proud of the fact that in this new wondrous world he is nobody. [. . . .] I decided to become this new Russian Balt who is willing to give up everything. I decided to become a person who, instead of “all,” chooses “nothing.” To become a person who does not want, can not, does not, does not bend, cannot be molded—and is proud of it. I was proud of my status as a foreigner. I was against. I was a “negative nein.” (Ivanov 2008) That this position of non-belonging does not have anything to do with the metropolitan cosmopolitanism and its privileges is exemplified by a reference to Rushdie: I read Rushdie the way some punks read Bakunin. It seemed to me, I wanted to believe it that this word [non-belonger] somehow brought me closer to another word—cosmopolitan. To that luxury attainable only to holders of a British passport. Not to those who had a “grey passport”—there was only one step down from them: wanted criminals. (Ivanov 2008)

328  Daniele Monticelli and Eneken Laanes He plays with the English formula “a man inbetween” only in the form of an intellectually fashionable attempt at self-poetization, utterly unhelpful in his impossible position. Rather than in terms of the Western cosmopolitan discourse of hybridity, the impossible position of Ivanov’s protagonists could be understood with the help of Edward Said’s notion of secular criticism, read by Aamir Mufti as, above all, anti-nationalist—an ethical possibility afforded by a minority position (Mufti 1998, 107). For Said the secular as an ethical position of critique means always looking at the nationalist ideologies of hearth and home from the position of what these ideologies exclude and replacing the biological ties of filiation with affiliative social bonds. However, Said is also careful to point out that affiliative communities have a tendency to restore authority and start to function hegemonically in the same way that filiative ones do, so that a further step is required in order to remain attentive to the ways affiliation reproduces filiation (Said 1983, 19–20). Ivanov’s protagonists do precisely that. They have broken the filiative ties both to Russia and to the Russian-Estonian community in post-Soviet Estonia because of the ways the minority tries to mimic the majority. However, to form an affiliative relationship to the newly defined Estonian state, to become a naturalized Estonian is also out of the question for them. Seen from the minority position, the ethnicnationalist roots of the post-Soviet Estonian nation-building project are too transparent in their hegemonic filiative nature to become a viable option. Thus, after local and international recognition of his literary work, Ivanov rather decided to turn necessity into a virtue, as he stated in a 2012 interview: I am perfectly happy with the grey passport if that is what the deal is. [. . . .] I’ve lived enough in hippie communes to have my own vision of countries and social structures. The grey passport is a non-citizen’s passport. Citizenship—unidentified. Where else could you get such a wonderful document? It corresponds perfectly to my state of mind. (Afanasjev 2012)

Translation as a Space of Indetermination What does this brief analysis of the discussion on the Estonian version of Peotäis põrmu [A handful of dust] and, more generally, Ivanov’s exception to the criteria for identification within the Estonian literary, cultural, and social space tell us about translation and our way of understanding and studying it within contemporary translation studies? Our investigation clearly confirms the fundamental assumptions of the “cultural turn” (Bassnett and Lefevere 2001, xi), which focuses on the cultural, social, and political embeddedness of translation (see for instance Venuti

Battling around the Exception 329 2008 and Tymoczko 2000). As it demonstrates, the very same definition and determination of what is to be considered as a translation cannot be separated from its cultural and political context, not simply because a translation is nothing other than “what is regarded within the target culture, on whatever grounds” as a translation (Toury 1985, 20), but more importantly because such “being regarded” implies a kind of consensus that is always the unstable and precarious result of a hegemonic formation emerging from conflicts and negotiations, and grounded in some fundamental exclusion.16 What the case study seems to call into question are rather the strategies that committed approaches within translation studies have, often too univocally and exclusively, identified with resistance to cultural hegemony and political relevance in translation practices. This is, for instance, the case with Lawrence Venuti’s fundamental, but somewhat abused notion of “foreignization” (Venuti 1998a, 2010). Venuti’s understandable and commendable commitment to foreignizing translation strategies as an ethical attitude toward translation (Venuti 2008, 19) seems to have been turned over the last 15 years into a huge battle around the exception, by which scores of translation scholars try to come to terms with the cultural and linguistic indeterminacy of the space of translation (neither/nor, both/and) through a detailed measurement of the opposing forces of domestication and foreignization. The outcomes of this measurement are then reductively imagined as univocally determining the fidelity of the translation to either the domestic or the foreign and, consequently, its conformist confirmation or rebellious subversion of hegemonic linguistic, cultural, and sociopolitical patterns. Maria Tymoczko (2000) and Mona Baker (2010) have taken issue with the shortcomings of Venuti’s dichotomous categories in the analysis and understanding of translation and translation strategies.17 They draw attention to the contextualization of translation practices, which allow for different, even opposite strategies of resistance within different linguistic, cultural, and social settings. Thus, in the case of the Estonian version of Ivanov’s Peotäis põrmu [A handful of dust], the “scandal of translation” is not triggered by the betrayal of the domestic and a conscious foreignizing strategy employed by the translator. It is rather translation in itself—as an exceptional space of indetermination of the domestic and the foreign, the proper, and the improper—that becomes a scandal and an object of contention. Particularly remarkable in this case is that the very Estonian and Russian languages that are supposed to be criteria of identification for literatures, cultures, and communities become instruments of indetermination: we have thus both the impossible Estonian original of an author writing in Russian and the impossible Estonian translation of a missing Russian original.

330  Daniele Monticelli and Eneken Laanes Borrowing the terminology of committed translation studies, we could equivalently claim that “minoritization” as “deterritorialization of language” (see Venuti 1998b, 136) manifests itself in our case study as an indetermination of the positions of the majority and the minority. Let us consider Venuti’s definition of minority: I understand ‘minority’ to mean a cultural or political position that is subordinate, whether the social context that defines it is local, national or global. This position is occupied by languages and literatures that lack prestige or authority, the non-standard and the non-canonical, what is not spoken or read much by a hegemonic culture. Yet minorities also include the nation and social groups that are affiliated with these languages and literatures, the politically weak or under-represented. (Venuti 1998b, 135) Present-day Estonia is a good example of the fundamental relativity and ambiguity of the notions of minority and majority that are dependent on the topological (local, national or regional) and historical (present, past or future) scope of the evaluation. This is why discourses of national victimization and chauvinistic empowerment may alternatively or even contemporaneously surface in both the Estonian and the Russian community. Ivanov’s anti-identitarian stance and the protagonists of his work make these discourses inoperative, putting a majority (Soviet-time Russians) in the position of a minority (Estonians in the former Soviet Union), while the Estonian version of Peotäis põrmu [A handful of dust] equivalently pushes Estonian critics and the public to reconsider a minority (the post-Soviet-Russian community of Estonia and its “Russian-language writers”) from the position of a majority (post-Soviet Estonians and their “Estonian writers”). Not to mention the fact that Russian as a minority language in Estonian literature is of course a majority language with its majority literature on the regional and global scale. All this triggers a temporal, existential, and political short-circuit with disrupting effects on hegemonic separations and partitions.18 Should we consider the Estonian version of Peotäis põrmu [A handful of dust] as a “resistant translation?” If yes, only in the sense that it is resistant to any criterion of dichotomous analysis and classification. What matters here is neither the origin/source, nor the result/target, but the movement of indetermination in which they get involved. A movement that is the very essence of both translation and human life, as Ivanov suggests in the epiphanic end of his otherwise hopeless short story Zola [Ash]. “I am glad to be alive,” he writes there. “It appears that life is no more than movement from one room to another, from one train to another, from one country to another. It is an everyday phenomenon: on déménage” (Ivanov 2008).

Battling around the Exception 331

Notes 1 Based on the 2011 census out of the 1.3 million Estonian inhabitants, 326,000 were of Russian origin, 175 000 of them having Estonian citizenship. 2 In April 2007, the Estonian government removed the Soviet War Memorial commonly known as the “Bronze Soldier” from the center of Tallinn to a military cemetery. The decision provoked riots among members of the Russianspeaking community and developed into an international dispute between Estonia, Russia and the European Union. 3 Since the Estonian Republic was restored in 1991 on the principle of legal continuity from the inter-war republic, only those who had been citizens prior to the Soviet takeover in 1940 and their descendants were recognized as citizens according to the jus sanguinis principle. The members of the Russian minority were left to choose between Estonian citizenship through naturalization, which required a language exam that was difficult for many native speakers of Russian to pass, Russian citizenship, and a “gray passport” for those who neither wished to take Russian citizenship nor wished to become Estonian citizens or were unable to do so. As of 2016, more than 6% of the population (eighty thousand people) is still stateless in Estonia. 4 See the short novel Zola [Ash] (2008, Aldanov Literary Prize) and the novel Peotäis põrmu [A handful of dust] (2011b, Gorst prakha 2014c). 5 Because of the different time zones, eleven o’clock in Tallinn is midnight in Moscow. 6 If not otherwise indicated, all translations in this chapter are ours. 7 See the short story Moi datskii diadiushka [My Danish uncle] (2007), the novel Puteshestvie Hanumana na Lolland [Hanuman’s journey to Lolland] (2009, Russian Booker finalist, 2010; Award for the Russian-language author of the Cultural Endowment of Estonia, 2010) and the collection of short stories Kopengaga [Copenhagen] (2011, Award of the Russian-language author of the Cultural Endowment of Estonia, 2012). 8 Moi datskii diadiushka [My Danish uncle]. Novyi zhurnal (2007), No. 248, Est. transl. Minu Taani onuke. Tallinn: Loomingu Raamatukogu, 2010a; Zola [Ash]. Novyi zhurnal 2008, No. 253, Est. transl. Tuhk. Tallinn: Loomingu Raamatukogu, 2010; Puteshestvie Hanumana na Lolland [Hanuman’s journey to Lolland]. Tallinn: Avenarius, 2009; Moscow: AST, 2010b, Est. transl. Hanumani teekond Lollandile. Tallinn: Varrak, 2012a, Ger. transl. Hanuman’s Reise nach Lolland. München: Antje Kunstmann, 2012b, Fr. transl. Le voyage de Hanumân. Paris: Le Tripode (2016c); Kopengaga [Copenhagen]. Tallinn: KPD, 2011a; Peotäis põrmu [A handful of dust]. Tallinn: Varrak, 2011b, Gors’t prakha, Moscow: AST, 2014c; Harbinskie motylki [Harbin moths]. Tallinn: Avenarius, 2013a; Moscow: AST, 2014d, Est. transl. Harbini ööliblikad. Tallinn: Varrak, 2013b; Bizar [Bizarre]. Moscow: Ripol Classic, 2014a, Est. transl. Bizarre. Tallinn: Varrak, 2014b; Ispoved’ lunatika [Confession of a lunatic]. Tallinn: Avenarius, 2015a, Est. transl. Kuutõbise pihtimus. Tallinn: Varrak, 2015b; Rasmus Hanseni kirjutuskera [Rasmus Hansen writing ball], Tallinn: Kultuurileht, 2015c; Argonavt. [Argonaut]. Tallinn: Avenarius, 2016a, Est. transl. Argonaut, Tallinn: Varrak, 2016b. 9 For instance, Andrei Hvostov, a writer who identifies as Russian Estonian but writes exclusively in Estonian, has from his debut in 1999 been unproblematically identified by literary criticism as an Estonian author. 10 The Russian reception of Ivanov’s work remains beyond the scope of this article. In this respect see Taisija Laukkonen who argues that the interest of the Russian literary metropolis in Russian-Baltic authors is explained by the need “to comprehend the intercultural European “nowhere” from the perspective of its own cultural experience” (Laukkonen 2012, 26).

332  Daniele Monticelli and Eneken Laanes 11 The publication rights of the novel were bought together with those of Hanuman by the Moscow publisher AST, but the novel was not published until 2014 in the same volume with and under the title of Kharbinskie motylki [Harbin moths]. 12 The category of Russian-language author was established in 2001. Russian Estonian authors have manifested different attitudes toward the separate category for “Russian authors” (Kotjuh 2012). 13 In Rancière’s view, the partition of the sensible always coincides with a division or separation between “the visible and the invisible” (Rancière 2004, 13). 14 Peegel’s opinion was not published in the cultural section, but as the editorial of Eesti Päevaleht. This gives us a hint as to the wide national scope of the public debate around Peotäis põrmu [A handful of dust] that decisively transcended the narrow limits of literary criticism. 15 For instance, writer and critic Vahur Afanasjev writes of Ivanov’s troubles as the “pains of an orphan of the Empire” (Afanasjev 2010). 16 This was described earlier with a reference to Rancière’s notion of the partition of the sensible. 17 Tymoczko describes these dichotomies as “a kind of absolute or universal standard of evaluation, with a sort of on/off quality rather than a sliding scale” (Tymoczko 2000, 38). For a discussion of Venuti’s domestication/foreignization dichotomy and its critique, see Myskja 2013. 18 Thus, though Venuti claims that “the terms ‘majority’ and ‘minority’ are relative [. . .] and always dependent on a historically existing, even if changing situation” (Venuti 1998b, 135), we can say that Ivanov’s short-circuit overlaps different historical situations (Soviet and post-Soviet) and different politico-geographical realities (the national and the global). They deterritorialize one another, opening a topological and temporal space of exception, which Ivanov characterizes as “dwelling in a refugee camp” and “living in emigration in respect of one’s own past” (Laasik 2012, online).

References Afanasjev, Vahur. 2010. “Impeeriumi vaeslapse kannatused” [The suffering of an orphan of the empire]. Looming 6: 887–888. Afanasjev, Vahur. 2012. “Rahvusvahelise kirjanduse kodanik Andrei Ivanov” [The citizen of international literature]. Eesti Ekspress (1 December). Available online: http://ekspress.delfi.ee/areen/rahvusvahelise-kirjanduse-kodanikandrei-ivanov?id=65333836 (Accessed 15 March 2017). Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Agamben, Giorgio. 2000. Means without End: Notes on Politics. Translated by Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press. Agamben, Giorgio. 2004. The Open: Man and Animal. Translated by Kevin Attell. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Agamben, Giorgio. 2005. State of Exception. Translated by Kevin Attell. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Baker, Mona. 2010. “Reframing Conflict in Translation.” In Critical Readings in Translation Studies, edited by Mona Baker, 113–129. London and New York: Routledge.

Battling around the Exception 333 Bassnett, Susan and André Lefevere (eds.). [1998] 2001. Constructing Cultures: Essays on Literary Translation. Shanghai: Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press. Grigoreva, Tatiana. 2011. “Andrei Ivanov: Puteshestvie Hanumana na Lolland” [Andrei Ivanov: Hanuman’s journey to Lolland]. OpenSpace.ru. Available online: http://os.colta.ru/literature/events/details/19940/ (Accessed 29 March 2015). Ivanov, Andrei. 2007. “Moi datskii diadiushka” [My Danish uncle]. Novyi zhurnal 248. Available online: http://magazines.russ.ru/nj/2007/248/iv2.html (Accessed 29 March 2015). Ivanov, Andrei. 2008. “Zola” [Ash]. Novyi zhurnal 253. Available online: http:// magazines.russ.ru/nj/2008/253/iv1.html (Accessed 29 March 2015). Ivanov, Andrei. 2009. Puteshestvie Hanumana na Lolland [Hanuman’s journey to Lolland]. Tallinn: Avenarius. Ivanov, Andrei. 2010a. Minu taani onuke. Tuhk [My Danish uncle. Ash]. Tallinn: Loomingu Raamatukogu. Ivanov, Andrei. 2010b. Puteshestvie Hanumana na Lolland [Hanuman’s journey to Lolland]. Moscow: AST. Ivanov, Andrei. 2011a. Kopengaga [Copenhagen]. Tallinn: KPD. Ivanov, Andrei. 2011b. Peotäis põrmu [A handful of dust]. Tallinn: Varrak. Ivanov, Andrei. 2012a. Hanumani teekond Lollandile [Hanuman’s journay to Lolland]. Tallinn: Varrak. Ivanov, Andrei. 2012b. Hanuman’s Reise nach Lolland [Hanuman’s journey to Lolland]. München: Antje Kunstmann. Ivanov, Andrei. 2013a. Harbinskie motylki [Harbin moths]. Tallinn: Avenarius. Ivanov, Andrei. 2013b. Harbini ööliblikad [Harbin moths]. Tallinn: Varrak. Ivanov, Andrei. 2014a. Bizar [Bizarre]. Moscow: Ripol Classic. Ivanov, Andrei. 2014b. Bizarre. Tallinn: Varrak. Ivanov, Andrei. 2014c. Gors’t prakha [A handful of dust]. Moscow: AST. Ivanov, Andrei. 2014d. Harbinskie motylki [Harbin moths]. Moscow: AST. Ivanov, Andrei. 2015a. Ispoved’ lunatika [Confession of a lunatic]. Tallinn: Avenarius. Ivanov, Andrei. 2015b. Kuutõbise pihtimus [Confession of a lunatic]. Tallinn: Varrak. Ivanov, Andrei. 2015c. Rasmus Hanseni kirjutuskera [Rasmus hansen writing ball]. Tallinn: Loomingu Raamatukogu. Ivanov, Andrei. 2016a. Argonavt [Argonaut]. Tallinn: Avenarius. Ivanov, Andrei. 2016b. Argonaut. Tallinn: Varrak. Ivanov, Andrei. 2016c. Le voyage de Hanumân [Hanuman’s journey to Lolland]. Paris: Le Tripode. Jüristo, Tarmo. 2014. “Andrei Ivanov and the Anti-Hero of Our Time.” Estonian Literary Magazine 38: 27–31. Kotjuh, Igor. 2012. “Eesti venekeelne kirjandus: Kas osa eesti või vene kirjandusest?” [Estonian literature in Russian: Part of Estonian or Russian literature?]. Keel ja Kirjandus 2: 134–139. Kotjuh, Igor. 2013. “Eesti venekeelse kirjanduse nullindate põlvkond: vastuvõtt ja tõrked omaks tunnistamisel” [The millennial generation of Estonian literature in Russian: Reception and obstacles of inclusion]. Methis 11: 64–83.

334  Daniele Monticelli and Eneken Laanes Kulli, Jaanus. 2014. “Eestis sündinud kirjanik Andrei Ivanov: ‘Minu sümboolne kodumaa on ikkagi Venemaa’ ” [Andrei Ivanov, a writer born in Estonia: My symbolic homeland is still Russia]. Õhtuleht (22 March). Available online: http://www.ohtuleht.ee/569080/eestis-sundinud-kirjanik-andrei-ivanov-minusumboolne-kodumaa-on-ikkagi-venemaa- (Accessed 15 March 2017). Laanes, Eneken. 2012. “Andrei Ivanov ja rahvusülene (eestivene) kirjandus” [Andrei Ivanov and transnational Russian Estonian literature]. Sirp (8 March). Available online: http://www.sirp.ee/s1-artiklid/c7-kirjandus/andrei-ivanov-jarahvusuelene-eestivene-kirjandus/ (Accessed 15 March 2017). Laasik, Andres. 2012. “Andrei Ivanov: olen emigratsioonis oma mineviku suhtes” [Andrei Ivanov: I am in emigration from my past]. Eesti Päevaleht (7 January). Available online: http://epl.delfi.ee/news/arvamus/andrei-ivanov-olen-emigrat sioonis-oma-mineviku-suhtes?id=63743568 (Accessed 15 March 2017). Laukkonen, Taisija. 2012. “Baltic-Russian Literature: Writing from Nowhere?” Baltic Worlds 2: 24–26. Lotman, Rebekka. 2012. “Milleks õhutada vaenu tühja koha pealt?” [Why incite hatred out of nothing]. Sirp (2 March). Available online: http://www.sirp.ee/ s1-artiklid/c9-sotsiaalia/milleks-ohutada-vaenu-tuehja-koha-pealt/ (Accessed 15 March 2017). Martson, Ilona. 2010. “Kolm eestivene kirjanikku” [Three Russian Estonian authors]. Epifanio (13 April). Available online: http://www.epifanio.eu/nr13/ est/eestivene.html (Accessed 15 March 2017). Mufti, Aamir R. 1998. “Auerbach in Istanbul: Edward Said, Secular Criticism, and the Question of Minority Culture.” Critical Inquiry 25 (1): 95–125. Myskja, Kjetil. 2013. “Foreignisation and Resistance: Lawrence Venuti and His Critics.” Nordic Journal of English Studies 12 (2): 1–23. Peegel, Mari. 2012. “Eesti proosa vene keeles: Miks mitte?” [Estonian fiction in Russian: Why not?]. Eesti Päevaleht (9 February). Available online: http://epl.delfi.ee/news/arvamus/juhtkiri-eesti-proosa-vene-keeles-miks-mitte? id=63893641 (Accessed 15 March 2017). Rancière, Jacques. 2004. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. Translated by Gabriel Rockhill. London and New York: Continuum. Said, Edward. 1983. The World, the Text, and the Critic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sibrits, Heili. 2013. “Sisepaguluses sünnivad hitid” [Internal exile gives birth to hits]. Postimees (19 December). Available online: http://kultuur. postimees. ee/2636610/ sisepaguluses-sunnivad-hitid (Accessed 15 March 2017). Tigasson, Külli-Riin. 2012. “Maa, kus iial imesid ei sünni” [Country with no miracle]. Eesti Päevaleht (4 February). Available online: http://epl.delfi. ee/news/kultuur/maa-kus-iial-imesid-ei-sunni?id=63872464 (Accessed 15 March 2017). Toury, Gideon. 1985. “A Rationale for Descriptive Translation Studies.” In The Manipulation of Literature: Studies in Literary Translation, edited by Theo Hermans, 16–41. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: Benjamins. Tymoczko, Maria. 2000. “Translation and Political Engagement: Activism, Social Change and the Role of Translation in Geopolitical Shifts.” The Translator 6 (1): 23–47. Venuti, Lawrence. 1998a. The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference. London and New York: Routledge.

Battling around the Exception 335 Venuti, Lawrence. 1998b. “Introduction to the Special Issue ‘Translation and Minority.’ ” The Translator 4 (2): 135–144. Venuti, Lawrence. 2008. The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation. London and New York: Routledge. Venuti, Lawrence. 2010. “Translation as Cultural Politics: Régimes of Domestication in English.” In Critical Readings in Translation Studies, edited by Mona Baker, 65–79. London and New York: Routledge.

Notes on Contributors

Karine Åkerman Sarkisian holds a PhD in Slavic languages and is senior lecturer in Russian at the department of Modern Languages at Uppsala University. She also holds a MA in Romance languages. Her research primarily deals with the reception of Byzantine hagiography among the Slavs. Her publications cover text-critical studies, linguistic analysis, and editorial techniques of medieval manuscripts, emphasizing digital methods. Åkerman Sarkisian’s recent research embraces modernity and antiquity, applying advances within translation studies on medieval renderings. As part of the research project financed by the Swedish Research Council “The Reception of Monastic Sayings in European Culture: Scholarly Collaboration on a Digital Platform” at Lund University since January 2017, Åkerman Sarkisian explores the Slavic reception and mapping of the fluid and complex textual transmission of monastic sayings of collections called Verba Seniorum or Apophthegmata Patrum. Brian James Baer is professor of Russian and translation studies at Kent State University. He is founding editor of the journal Translation and Interpreting Studies and co-editor, with Michelle Woods of the book series Literatures, Cultures, Translation (Bloomsbury). He has edited a number of collected volumes, such as Contexts, Subtexts and Pretexts: Literary Translation in Eastern Europe and Russia (2011); No Good without Reward: The Selected Writings of Liubov Krichevskaya (2011); Russian Writers on Translation. An Anthology, with Natalia Olshanskaya (2013); and Researching Translation and Interpreting, with Claudia Angelelli (2015). He is also the translator of Juri Lotman’s final book-length work, The Unpredictable Workings of Culture (2013) and is currently working on an annotated translation of Andrei Fedorov’s 1953 Introduction to Translation Theory for which he was awarded the 2014 EST Translation Prize. His most recent monograph is Translation and the Making of Modern Russian Literature (2016). Alexandra Borisenko is associate professor at the Department of Philology at Moscow State University. Author of numerous critical and

338  Notes on Contributors theoretical works on literary history and literary translation, she has also translated many works of British and American literature into Russian, most recently Flaubert’s Parrot by Julian Barnes (jointly with Victor Sonkin). While her earlier work was devoted to issues of literary translation and the “Soviet translation school,” she later specialized in the detective genre and the Russian reception of nonsense literature. Since 1997, she has, together with Dr. Sonkin, taught a workshop on literary translation. The workshop has resulted in the publication of several books translated by students, including two major anthologies of British and American crime fiction (2009, 2011). Professor Borisenko also teaches a course in theoretical aspects of translation. Vitaly Chernetsky is a professor of Slavic languages and literatures at the University of Kansas. He is the author of the monograph Mapping Postcommunist Cultures: Russia and Ukraine in the Context of Globalization (2007) and of numerous articles and essays on Russian and Ukrainian literature and film, as well as translation studies. He co-edited the anthology Crossing Centuries: The New Generation in Russian Poetry (2000) and the annotated Ukrainian-language edition of Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism (2009). Among his translations are two novels by one of Ukraine’s leading contemporary writers, Yuri Andrukhovych: The Moscoviad (2008) and Twelve Circles (2015). Katerina Clark is professor of comparative literature and of Slavic languages and literatures at Yale University, where she is also a member of the Senior Committee for Film Studies Program. Author of the pioneering study The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual (1981; third edition, Indiana University Press 2000), Professor Clark has written extensively on topics of Russian-Soviet culture. Her book Petersburg, Crucible of Cultural Revolution (Harvard University Press 1995) was awarded the Wayne S. Vucinich Prize for the best book of 1995 in Russian, East European, or Eurasian studies. Professor Clark’s latest book, Moscow, the Fourth Rome: Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism and the Evolution of Soviet Culture, 1931–1941 (Harvard University Press 2011), highlights the significance of translation during the peak of Soviet internationalism in the 1930s and the concept of world literature à la russe as it developed throughout this decade. She also coauthored, with Evgeny Dobrenko, the annotated volume Soviet Culture and Power: A History in Documents, 1917–1953 (Yale University Press 2007). Her monograph Mikhail Bakhtin, coauthored with Michael Holquist (Harvard University Press 1984), has been translated into a range of languages, including Japanese, Italian, Portuguese, and Chinese. Olga Demidova is a professor of philosophy at St. Petersburg State University (Pushkin), where she teaches Russian students of BA, MA, and

Notes on Contributors 339 PhD levels a wide range of philosophy courses (ethics and professional ethics, aesthetics, philosophy of culture, axiology, and semiotics, as well as courses on St. Petersburg culture). She is also a professor at MARCA International program (European University in St. Petersburg), where she teaches courses on Russian culture and literature for BA and MA level foreign students. As a researcher, Prof. Demidova specializes in comparative culture studies, theory, and history of translation, gender studies, women’s writing, Russian émigré history. She is the author and editor of 15 books, including V. Khodaseviich’s Kamer-furierskii zhurnal (Moscow, 2000, 2002), Metamorphoses in Exile (2003), We: An Anthology of Russian Émigré Women’s Prose (2003), Galina Kuznetsova’s Grasskii dnevnik (2007), World Capitals in Russian Émigré Poetry (2011), a collection of women’s memoirs on Civil war in the Crimea (2013), Exile as The Mission: Aesthesis and Ethos of Russian Emigration (2015), and several collections of Russian émigré memoirs. Anna Giust is lecturer of Russian at University Ca’ Foscari of Venice. She holds a PhD in history and criticism of visual and performing arts, obtained at the University of Padua with the thesis Towards Russian Opera: Growing National Consciousness in 18th-Century Operatic Repertoire (2012). Her previous educational history includes a master degree in Musicology at University Ca’ Foscari of Venice (2008) and a master degree in Russian language and literature at University of Venice (2004). She is the author of several articles concerning Russian music theater from the eighteenth up to the twentieth centuries. Katharine Hodgson is associate professor in Russian at the University of Exeter, United Kingdom. From 2010 to 2014, she led a collaborative project investigating the post-Soviet reconfiguration of the twentiethcentury poetry canon, examining questions of the canon and national identity, analyzing the role of anthologies, and exploring Boris Slutskii’s position in the post-Soviet canon. A coauthored book and a collection of essays based on the work of the project will appear shortly. Alongside work on Russian poetry of the Soviet period, including on Leningrad poet Ol′ga Berggol′ts, she has investigated Russian translations of poetry by both Rudyard Kipling and Heinrich Heine, and Russian/Soviet themes in Brecht’s exile poetry. Maria Khotimsky is senior lecturer and Russian language coordinator in the department of Global Studies and Languages at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her research interests include history and theory of poetic translation in Russia, contemporary Russian poetry, and literary translingualism. She is a co-editor and contributor to the volume of essays Ol’ga Sedakova: Stikhi, Smysly, Prochteniia [Olga Sedakova: Poems, Meanings, Readings] (Moscow: NLO,

340  Notes on Contributors 2016). Among her recent and forthcoming publications are articles on the ideology of translation in the Soviet Union, poetics of translation in the works of Marina Tsvetaeva, and translations of children’s poetry in the Soviet era. Lars Kleberg is professor emeritus of Russian at Södertörn University (Sweden). An author of numerous works on Slavic literature, theater, art, and translation, his most recent books are translations of Anton Chekhov’s plays into Swedish, an essay on Chekhov (Tjechov och friheten [Chekhov and freedom] (2010)), and a monograph on Ivan Aksenov: Vid avantgardets korsvägar. Om Ivan Aksionov och den ryska modernismen [At the crossroads of the avant-garde. On Ivan Aksenov and Russian modernism] (2015) with an English edition forthcoming. He is general editor of the bio-bibliographical database Svenskt översättarlexikon  (Swedish Dictionary of Translators): www.oversat tarlexikon.se. Marina Kostionova holds a PhD in translation studies from Moscow State University (2015) with a dissertation entitled The Literary Reputation of a Writer in Russia: Translation as Reflecion and Forming Factor (Russian translations of Charles Dickens’s The Pickswick Papers) (in Russian). Her research interests include modes and strategies of translation in ninteenth-century Russia, translation in changing socio-cultural contexts, and the translation and reception of Charles Dickens in Russia. Since 2007 she has been participating in literary translation projects lead by A. Borisenko and V. Sonkin. Ekaterina Kuznetsova is a philologist and translator. In 2011, she defended her dissertation at Moscow State University titled Ideological and Censorial Changes in the Adaptation of a Translated Text. A Case Study of Soviet-Era Translations of the 1950s–1960s. Eneken Laanes is senior research fellow at the Under and Tuglas Literature Centre of the Estonian Academy of Sciences and associate professor of Comparative Literature at Tallinn University. She has had fellowships at Free University Berlin and Yale University. She is the author of Unresolved Dialogues: Memory and Subjectivity in the PostSoviet Estonian Novel (in Estonian, 2009) and the editor of Novels, Histories, Novel Nations: Historical Fiction and Cultural Memory in Finland and Estonia (2015). Her research interests include trauma theory, transnational memory, post-socialist memory cultures in Eastern Europe, contemporary world literature, transnational literature, and multilingualism. Kåre Johan Mjør is a researcher in Russian philosophy and Russian intellectual history at Uppsala Centre for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Uppsala University. He is the author of Reformulating Russia: The

Notes on Contributors 341 Cultural and Intellectual Historiography of Russian First-Wave Émigré Writers (2011). His current project explores the concept of “creativity” (tvorchestvo) in Russian thought. Daniele Monticelli is professor of Italian studies and semiotics and head of Western European studies at Tallinn University. His research interests include translation history, relations between translation and ideology, philosophy of language, literary semiotics, and contemporary critical theory with particular focus on the political thinking of Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, and Jacques Rancière. He has published several articles and edited books on these topics, including the collective volume Between Cultures and Texts. Itineraries in Translation History (2011). Elena Ostrovskaya holds a doctorate degree (kandidatskaia) in Russian literature from the Russian State University for the Humanities (the subject of her thesis was Innokentij Annenskij’s poetic translations from and his wider appropriation of French ninteenth-century poetry). Her research interests include comparative studies of poetry (Russian, French, and American parallels), poetics of poetic translation, and poetics of urbanism. Her current research project is focused on the poetics of urbanism in Russian and American modernism (1890–1910). Dr. Ostrovskaya teaches a variety of courses in English and Russian literature, academic discourse, and English-Russian translation in the National Research University—Higher School of Economics (Moscow). Tatiana Pentkovskaya is professor in the Russian language department of Lomonosov Moscow State University. Her research interests include Old Church Slavonic, Old Russian, language of Old Church Slavonic, and Old Russian translations. A graduate of the Lomonosov Moscow State University Faculty of Philology (1993), she holds a PhD in Russian language. In 2002–2003 she was a fellow in Byzantine studies at Dumbarton Oaks Library and Collections (Washington, DC, USA) and is the recipient of a research grant from Russian Research Fund of Humanities (2011–2013). Piet Van Poucke is associate professor of Russian language and culture and head of the Russian section of the department of Translation, Interpreting and Communication (Faculty of Arts and Philosophy, Ghent University, Belgium). He defended his PhD on the early literary work of the Russian-Jewish writer Ilia Ehrenburg in 1999. He is a member of the steering committee of the “Russia Platform” (Ghent University) and co-coordinator of CERISE (Centre for Russian International Socio-Political and Economic Studies, Ghent University). His current research activities deal with the following topics: translation of journalistic texts into Russian, translation of metaphor, Western

342  Notes on Contributors translation policy toward Russian literature (and vice versa), and retranslation of (Russian) literature. He is guest editor of a special issue of the International Journal of Literary Linguistics titled Novel insights in the linguistic study of literary translation. Aleksei Semenenko is associate professor in the Slavic department of Stockholm University. He holds a PhD in Russian literature from Stockholm University. He is the author of Russian Translations of Hamlet and Literary Canon Formation (Stockholm University, 2007), The Texture of Culture: An Introduction to Yuri Lotman’s Semiotic Theory (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), and the editor of Aksenov and the Environs (with Lars Kleberg; Södertörns högskola, 2012). He has published works on translation, literature, and semiotics and is currently working on a project on Russian satire and censorship. Yulia Tikhomirova is an associate professor in the faculty of philology at National Research Tomsk State University (TSU), Russia. She teaches English, literature, translation, and conducts seminars on literary translation. She holds a PhD in Russian literature from TSU. Her research interests include Russian-UK cultural relations, poetic translation, and the translation of poetic texts for musical performance (vocal translation). She is an alumna of 2011/2012 Fulbright Visiting Scholar Program (Indiana University, Bloomington) as well as the recipient of several research funds including three grants from the Ministry of Science and Education of the Russian Federation, and a grant from the V. Potanin Fund for young Russian scholars. Anastasia Urzha is associate professor in the Russian language department of Lomonosov Moscow State University. Her research interests include contrastive linguistics, functional grammar, Russian syntax, Semantics, Stylistics, the Language of Russian Literature and Russian Translations. She holds a PhD in ‘Russian Language’ and ‘Comparative Linguistics, Typology and Contrastive Linguistics’ (2002) from Lomonosov Moscow State University. She is the recipient of two “Perspective Lecturer” grants (2005, 2010) and a “Lecturer-online” grant (2011). Valerii Viugin (PhD) works as a senior researcher at the Institute of Russian literature of the Russian Academy of Science in St. Petersburg (Pushkin House), the Department of New Russian Literature. His research interests range throughout Soviet and Russian literature of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, theory of literature, and cultural studies. He has published two monographs and numerous articles on topics including socialist realism, the Russian avant-garde, and Soviet children’s literature, with a particular focus on the writers Andrei Platonov, Daniil Kharms, Mikhail Zoschenko, and Samuil Marshak.

Notes on Contributors 343 Susanna Witt is associate professor of Slavic languages and literatures and senior lecturer in Russian at the department of Slavic and Baltic Languages, Finnish, Dutch, and German, Stockholm University. She is also a certified translator from Russian into Swedish. A specialist in Boris Pasternak’s poetry and prose (Creating Creation: Readings of Pasternak’s Doktor Zhivago, 2000), she has written extensively on topics related to Russian translation history of the Soviet period, such as Soviet practices of indirect translation, translation from the “languages of the peoples of the USSR,” concept of the “Soviet school of translation,” and translation and intertextuality in the Soviet context. In 2016, she co-edited a special issue of Translation and Interpreting Studies, devoted to “Russian Contexts of Literary Translation” (with Julie Hansen). Her current research project, “The Interface with the Foreign: The ‘Soviet School of Translation,’ Cold War and World Literature,” is funded by the Swedish research council. Elena Zemskova is an associate professor of the Faculty of the Humanities at the National Research University Higher School of Economics teaching courses in Russian and European literature and literary criticism. Her research interests include comparative literature and translation studies. She has published a number of articles on the history of literary translation and international communication in the USSR in the 1930s, among them “Georgian Poets’ Translations by Boris Pasternak in the Soviet Culture of 1930s” (2013); “Strategii loial’nosti: diskussiia o tochnosti khudozhestvennogo perevoda na Pervom vsesoiuznom soveshchanii perevodchikov 1936 goda” (2015); and “Between the Battlefield and the Marketplace: International Literature Magazine in Britain” (2016), coauthored with Elena Ostrovskaya.

Index

acceptability 33, 264 acculturation 122 accuracy 1, 205 – 7, 223, 278, 280 adaptation 27, 52, 54, 66, 70, 72, 86, 128, 141, 199 – 200, 206, 210, 225 – 6, 233, 243 aesthetics 95, 98, 106 – 7, 191, 195, 198, 243, 295, 307 – 9, 313, 317 Afanas’ev, Aleksandr 107, 199 Agroskin, Anatolii 281 Aksenov, Ivan 125 – 8, 130 – 1, 133 – 4, 282 Akunin, Boris 284 – 5 Alekseev, Mikhail 6 Alekseeva, Irina 6 Angelelli, Claudia 2 Anichkov, Dmitrii 61 Anikst, Aleksandr 281 Annenskaia, Aleksandra 119 Ansen, Allan 300 Apletin, Mikhail 160 Appiah, Kwame Anthony 2 – 3 Apter, Emily 2 Araja, Francesco 68 assemblage 1, 149, 153 Auden, W.H. 13, 292 – 302 Aust, Martin 52 Avtonomova, Natalia 227, 229, 251 Azerbaijani 175 – 6 Azeri 296 Azov, Andrei 217, 221, 223 – 4, 226, 251 Bach, Richard 37, 45 Baer, Brian James 4, 6, 9 – 11, 97, 155, 185 – 6, 220 – 2, 224, 230, 233, 248, 250 – 3, 258, 264, 309 Baker, Houston 154

Baker, Mona 38, 329 Bakhtin, Mikhail 97 Bal’mont, Konstantin 9, 314 Baranov, Aleksandr 278, 281 Barenbaum, Iosif E. 91 Barri, Dzh. 213 – 14, 216 – 17 Barrie, J.M. 211 – 16 Barsov, Anton 56, 58 – 60 Bartoshevich, Aleksei V. 282 Bassnett, Susan 110, 140, 147, 149 – 50, 328 Baum, Frank 191, 207 Bazilevich, Maria 86, 88 Beach, Joseph Warren 302 Belorusets, Mark 251 Belorussian 7, 133, 175, 180 Berdzhess, Entoni 46 – 7 Berg, Nikolai 131 – 4 Berlina, Alexandra 221, 251, 311 bilingualism 13 Bobrov, Sergei 126, 128 Bogdanov, Konstantin 251 Boldyrev, Iurii 240, 251, 253 Bonecchi, Giuseppe 68 Borisenko, Alexandra 12, 194, 217, 318 Boroditskaia, Marina 251 Boshniak, Vladimir 46 Bradbury, Ray 37, 44 – 5 Brecht, Bertolt 12, 241 – 53 Brenner, Joachim 190 Briusov, Valerii 9, 176, 184, 211, 220, 225 – 6, 251 Brodsky, Joseph 13, 243, 292, 296, 299 – 302 Burak, Alexander 12, 303 Burgess, Anthony 37, 45 – 7 Burnett, Leon 6, 209, 251

Index  345 Burton, Antoinette 144, 155 Byron, George Gordon 96, 98 – 107, 122, 182, 224, 233 Campbell, Thomas 104, 107 cannibalism 188, 190 – 1, 200 canon destabilization 282 – 3, 287 – 8 canonization 13, 111, 122 Carbonell, Ovidio 32 carnivalization 282 Carpenter, Humphrey 216 Carrère, Emmauel 318 Casanova, Jean-Yves 318 Casanova, Pascale 2 – 3, 139 Cassin, Barbara 2 Cassirer, Ernst 53 Ceccherelli, Andrea 6 censor 165, 197, 207, 209, 259, 277, 303 censorship 10, 12, 159, 166 – 7, 169 – 70, 207 – 8, 214, 217 – 18, 241 – 4, 251, 259, 261, 268 – 9, 271, 300 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 4 Chernov, Andrei 278 – 81, 287 Cho, Heekyong 5, 9 Chukovskii, Kornei 10, 12, 190, 194, 196 – 7, 206, 212, 220 – 1, 226, 251, 314, 318 Chukovskii, Nikolai 190, 220, 224, 230, 251 Clark, Katerina 149 – 50, 160 Collodi, Carlo 196 colloquialisms 112, 114 – 17, 120 – 1, 243, 278 comic opera 66, 70, 76, 78 communism 4, 154, 162, 170, 296 Constantino, Lorenzo 6 context 1 – 5, 7, 11 – 13, 40 – 1, 96, 100, 103, 121 – 2, 220 – 2, 225, 229, 231, 233 – 4, 309, 314 – 15 Copleston, S.J. Frederick 57 Cordingley, Anthony 318 Corr, Charles A. 58 Coudenys, Wim 8, 53 counterfeit 11, 149, 185 Cronin, Michael 139 Crum, Ewing Walter 33 Cruz-Malavé, Arnaldo 306, 311 culture 2 – 3, 12 – 13, 21, 27 – 32, 51 – 4, 110, 145 – 7, 150, 154 – 5, 241 – 2, 257 – 8, 260 – 2, 264 – 5, 306 – 7, 311 – 12

Damrosch, David 2, 5 Da Ponte, Lorenzo 73 Dashevskii, Grigorii 251 David-Fox, Michael 11, 160 Deane-Cox, Sharon 262 Demidova, Olga 221 Demourova, Nina 209 – 12, 214, 216 – 18 Dickens, Charles 9, 111 – 20, 122 – 3, 205, 258 Diddi, Cristiano 6 Discenza, Nicole Guenther 30 Dmitrevskii, Ivan Afanas’evich 71, 73, 75, 78 Dobroliubov, Nikolai 264 Donskoi, Mikhail 251 Dumas, Alexandre 260, 264 Eco, Umberto 312 Eisenstein, Sergei 243 Ellis, Charles 52 Emmerich, Roland 287 Engels, Friedrich 140 Enlightenment 53 – 5, 57, 72, 89, 119, 311 Eppel,’ Asar 251, 298 equivalence 1, 19 – 22, 28, 30, 32, 103, 223, 225, 306, 317 ethics 3, 55, 77, 200, 313, 329 Etkind, Alexander 140 Etkind, Efim 6, 192 – 4, 196, 223, 225 – 7, 229, 241 Even-Zohar, Itamar 8, 38, 174, 258 fabrication 149, 153, 177 Fainshtein, Mikhail 92 falsification 149 Fedin, Konstantin 195 – 6 Fedorov, Andrei 6, 207, 223, 225 – 6 Fedotov, George 31 Fénelon, François 51, 77, 88 Féval, Paul 264 fidelity 1, 30, 97, 103, 329 Fleischmann, Suzanne 39 Fomenko, Anatolii 286 Ford, John 125 foreignization 2 Foreign Literature (journal) 10 – 11 Frank, David 188 – 9 Franklin, Simon 7, 20 – 2

346 Index Fridzeri, Alexandre 75 Friedberg, Maurice 6, 11, 170, 251, 258 – 60, 266, 268 Fukari, Alexandra 2 Gachechiladze, Givi 223 Gallagher, Aoife 253 Gasparov, Mikhail 128, 131, 133, 183 – 4, 211, 227, 229 Gatov, Vasilii 184 Gentzler, Edwin 140, 149 – 50, 153, 250 Georgievskii, Konstantin 189 Gernet, Mikhail 189 Ginsberg, Allen 309, 312 – 14 Gitovich, Aleksandr 231 glasnost 12, 260 – 1, 269 Glazova, Anna 251 globalization 139 Globus, Gordon 1 Gnedich, Tatiana 224 – 5, 233, 251 Goerdt, Wilhelm 51 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 5, 10, 115, 122, 218, 301 Gogol, Nikolai 116, 118, 192 Goldstein, Philip 154 Golenishchev-Kutuzov, Pavel 69 – 70 Golitsyn, Nikolai N. 89, 92 Golitsyna, Varvara 86 – 8 Göpfert, Frank 92 Gor’kii, Maksim 175 – 6, 183, 190 Greenleaf, Monica 98 Gumilev, Nikolai 9 – 10, 144, 226 Gunning, Susannah 89 Gusev, V. 182 – 3 Gutner, Mikhail 292, 295 – 7 Håkanson, Nils 13 Harvey, Keith 310 – 11, 317 – 18 Hatim, Basil 38 Hemingway, Ernest 12, 144, 159 – 62, 164 – 70, 208, 218, 303 Hermans, Theo 6 hermeneutics 6 Hodgson, Katharine 12, 252 Hofmeier, Isabel 144, 155 Hokenson, Jan Walsh 318 Hollindale, Peter 215 Holt, Katharine 251 homosexuality 312, 318 House, Juliane 32, 38 Hughes, Lindsey 51

Iasnov, Mikhail 221, 225 – 6, 251 identity 52, 54, 95, 142, 186, 246, 285, 306, 308, 310 – 11, 314, 317, 321 – 2, 325 – 7 ideology 140, 143, 222 – 4, 226 – 7, 230 – 1, 234, 259, 261, 265, 267 – 9, 271, 295, 297 – 8, 301 – 2, 328 imitation 11, 78, 98, 102, 104, 116, 131, 155, 185 Inggs, Judith 6, 191, 207, 218 Inghilleri, Moira 2 International Literature (journal) 10, 142, 294 invisibility 324 Ioffe, Mark L. 195 Irmscher, Michael 4 – 5 Israel, Jonathan 57 Ivanov, Andrei 321 – 8, 330 – 2 Ivashev, Vasilii 91 Izzo, David Garret 295 Jakobson, Roman 38 jargon 216, 243, 283 Jerome, Jerome K. 37, 44 – 5 Jüristo, Tarmo 322 – 3 Kalashnikova, Elena 234 Kalashnikova, Evgenia 159 – 60 Kalinnikov, Pavel 92 Kant, Immanuel 53, 57 – 8, 62 Kashkin, Ivan 159 – 61, 206 – 7, 209, 217, 225, 294, 296 kata poda 22 Kazakh 175 – 6, 180, 251 Kheraskov, Mikhail 87 Khotimsky, Maria 10, 12, 194, 218, 252 Khrapovitskii, Mikhail 87 Kleberg, Lars 125, 127, 134, 252 Klimkiewicz, Aurelia 317 – 18 Kliuchevskii, Vasilii O. 31 Kliuev, Nikolai 189 Kogan, Viktor 189 Kollodi, Karlo 196 Kol’tsov, Mikhail 161 Korshunova, Nadezhda 278 – 9, 287 Korte, Barbara 293 Kostyleva, Nina A. 91 Kothari, Rita 6 Kotjuh, Igor 324, 332 Koyré, Alexandre 58, 62 Kozel’skii, Iakov 60 Kozlov, Aleksei 9, 96 – 107, 288

Index  347 Kozlov, Ivan 9, 96, 99, 101, 105, 107 Kozlovskii, Vladimir 318 Kozminius 286 Krefting, Ellen 57 Kriukov, Andrei Nikolaevich 69 Kruzhkov, Grigorii 251, 302 Krymov, Dmitrii 279 Kryzhanovskii, Zakhar 69 – 70 Kuzmin, Mikhail 309 Laanes, Eneken 324 Laasik, Andres 324, 326, 332 Lacayo, Aarón 312 – 13, 317 Larkosh, Christopher 310 Laukkonen, Taisija 324, 331 Lederle, Mikhail 122 Ledkovsky, Marina 92 Lefevere, André 1, 110, 252, 328 Lehmann, John 294 – 6 Lehmann-Carli, Gabriela 53 Leighton, Lauren 6, 12, 107, 217, 251 Levidova, Inna 298 Levin, Iurii 93, 95, 107, 131, 223 Levine, Suzanne Jill 2 Lewis, C.S. 37, 43, 45, 208, 218 LGBT 308, 310 – 11, 318 liberalization 91, 218 Likhachev, Dmitrii 7 Likhachev, Ivan 309 Linetskaia, El’ga 227 – 30, 234, 251 Litvinova, Marina 286 localization 29 – 30 Locke, John 57, 61 Lofting, Hugh John 191 Lomonosov, Mikhail 8, 51 – 2, 61, 77 Loseff, Lev 303 Loseva, Svetlana V. 39 – 40 Lotman, Iurii 277 Lotman, Rebekka 324 – 6 Lozinskii, Mikhail 97, 224 – 6, 277, 280 – 2 Lygo, Emily 6, 13, 251 Madariaga, Isabel de 53 Maiakovskii, Vladimir 243, 312 Malevez, Marc 33 Malia, Martin 6 Manalansan, Martin 306, 311, 314 Markov, Vladimir 125, 288 Marlowe, Christopher 286, 313, 315 Marshak, Samuil 188, 192 – 5, 197 – 9, 225 – 30, 234 Martin, William 311

Martín y Soler, Vicente 73, 76 Marx, Karl 4, 140, 201 Marxism-Leninism 11, 140, 146, 149 Mason, Ian 38 Maurseth, Anne Beate 57 Meilakh, Mikhail 125, 127 – 8, 134 Meintjes, Libby 6 Mekhlis, Lev 175 – 6, 183 Melekhtsii 286 Mendelson, Edward 297 – 8 Menzel, Birgit 6 metatranslation 106 Mikhel’son, Sharlotta 89, 93 Mikushevich, Vladimir 229 Miller, Aleksei 52 Miller, Frank 177 mistranslation 33, 155 Mjør, Kåre Johan 61 Mogutin, Yaroslav (Slava) 13, 306 – 9, 311 – 18 Moldovan, Aleksandr M. 40 – 1 Mordovtsev, Daniil 92 Morozov, Mikhail 277, 280 Moss, Kevin 318 Mueller-Vollmer, Kurt 4 – 5 Mufti, Aamir R. 328 Munday, Jeremy 38 Munson, Marcella 318 Myskja, Kjetil 332 Nabokov, Vladimir 5, 13, 218 Narkevich, Aleksandr Iu. 265 Nesterov, Anton 251 Nida, Eugene 19, 22, 28, 30, 32 Nikiforova, Nadezhda 86, 88 Niranjana, Tejaswini 2 Nord, Christiane 32 norms 12, 23 – 4, 30, 89, 110, 154, 207, 221 – 3, 243, 250, 310, 318 Nosovskii, Gleb 286 Novikov, Nikolai 54 Novomirova, Valentina 286 Oden, Uisten Khiu 295, 300 – 1 Olenina, Anna 103 Ol’khovskii, Evgenii 91 Olshanskaya, Natalia 9 – 10, 220, 251, 258, 264 Orlova, Raisa 160 – 1, 170 Paisiello, Giovanni 69 paratext 100, 277 – 8

348 Index Pasternak, Boris 12, 125, 225 – 30, 234, 241, 246 – 53, 277, 279 – 83 Pavlov, Aleksei 55 Peegel, Mari 325, 332 Pentkovskaya, Tatiana V. 37, 39 Peshkov, Igor’ 278, 280, 286 – 7 Petrovykh, Maria 231 – 4 philosophy 51 – 2, 55 – 62, 90, 311 Pichkhadze, Anna A. 39 – 40, 42 Platonov, Andrei 142, 159, 199 Poderv’ians’kyi, Les’ 283 – 4 Pollock, Sheldon 141 Ponomarev, Stepan 92 Poplavskii, Vitalii 278 – 9 Popovskii, Nikolai 56 – 61 Posokhov, Sergei 54 Preuss, Hilmar 85 pseudotranslation 105 – 7, 231, 259, 324 Ptushko, Aleksandr 199 Pustarnakov, Vladimir 57 Pustogarov, Andrei 278, 281 Pym, Anthony 260 – 2 queer 13, 306, 309 – 10, 312, 314 – 17 Radek, Karl 294 Radishchev, Aleksandr 54 Radlov, Nikolai 195 Radlova, Anna 277, 280 Raeff, Marc 57 Rait, Richard 152 – 3, 156 Rancière, Jacques 324, 332 Rapoport, Vitalii 278 – 9 Red Pinkertonism 259 Renner, Andrea 54 rewriting 110, 159, 165, 167, 184, 207, 218, 226, 229 – 30, 295, 297, 302, 317 rhetoric 2, 58, 115, 195, 205 rhyme 132, 179, 182, 184, 188, 192, 194, 206, 229, 233, 243, 279, 314, 316 rhythm 112 – 13, 116 – 17, 120, 125 – 6, 179, 182, 198, 229 – 30, 243 Rimbaud, Arthur 309, 315 Roberts, Michael 294, 296 Rogger, Hans 52 – 3 Rokotov, Timofei 295 Romanovich, Igor’ 294 – 5, 297 Rosenthal, Charlotte 92 Rosslyn, Wendy 85, 92 Rüegg, Walter 55 Ryan-Hayes, Karen 318

Safiullina, Nailya 142, 159, 299 Said, Edward 328 Sakai, Naoki 4 Sato-Rossberg, Nana 6 Scherr, Barry 221, 251, 318 Schippel, Larissa 6 Schmidt-Biggemann, Wilhelm 55 Schneiders, Werner 55, 61 Sears, Olivia E. 5 Semenenko, Aleksei 12 – 13, 227, 276 – 7, 282, 288 sexuality 307, 310, 312, 315 Shaimiev, V.A. 39 Shaitanov, Igor’ 287 Sherry, Samantha 6, 12, 144, 159, 165 – 6, 207 – 8, 217, 221, 224 Sheveleva, Maria N. 43 Shklovskii, Viktor 46, 195 Shpet, Gustav 55, 58 Shuster, Eduard 298 Sibrits, Heili 324, 326 Sigrist, Christian 264 Simonov, Konstantin 161, 164 Slutskii, Boris 225, 240 – 53 Smith, Barbara H. 293, 296 Smith, G.S. 252 Sobolevskii, Aleksei I. 31 socialist realism 11 – 12, 148 – 50, 153 – 5, 223, 265 Sokolov, Iurii 182 – 4 Solonitsyn, Vladimir 112, 114 Speranskii, Mikhail 51 Spurlin, William 312 Stalin, Joseph 11, 160 – 1, 175, 192, 197, 218, 242, 252, 299 Stasov, Vasilii 91 Stasov, Vladimir 66, 91 Stasova, Nadezhda 91 Stepanov, Sergei 278, 281, 286 – 7 Strauss, Jennifer 293, 295 structuration 149, 153 Sumarokov, Aleksandr 8, 276 Tahir Gürçağlar, Şehnaz 142 Tajik 175 Tak-hung Chan, Leo 6 Teplov, Georgii 59 – 60 Tigasson, Külli-Riin 324 Timm, Stefan 25 Tokmakova, Irina 211, 213 – 16 Tolstoy, Leo 111, 118, 265 Tolz, Vera 51 Toporov, Viktor 293, 298, 300 – 302 topos 188, 322

Index  349 Tourneur, Cyril 125, 134 Toury, Gideon 329 translatability 186, 225, 234, 251 Trauberg, Natalia 43, 218, 251 Travers, Pamela 37, 45 Trediakovskii, Vasilii 8, 51, 67, 69, 77 Tretiakov, Sergei 142 – 3, 243, 245, 252 Trubnikova, Maria 91 Tsvetaeva, Marina 195, 200, 225 Tsvetkov, Aleksei 280 – 1 Tubianskii, Mikhail 141 Turkmen 175 Twain, Mark 37, 45, 259 – 60, 262 – 4 Tymoczko, Maria 140, 149 – 50, 153, 224, 329, 332 Tyulenev, Sergey 6, 8, 52 – 3, 60, 85, 92, 251 Ukrainian 7, 51, 175, 180, 283 untranslatability 2, 43 Urzha, Anastasia 37, 44 Uspenskii, Boris 13, 22, 54, 277 Uspenskii, Eduard 201 utilitarianism 55 Vail,’ Petr 283 Venuti, Lawrence 1 – 2, 19, 29, 164, 218, 222, 224, 234, 293, 300, 328 – 30, 332 Vezhbitskaia, Anna 38 – 9, 42 visibility 11, 263, 307, 310 Vitkovskii, Mikhal 318 Volkov, Aleksandr 191, 195, 207 Volkov, Solomon 207, 218, 292, 299 – 300, 302 Voloshin, Maksimilian 189, 220, 251 Volzhina, Natalia 159, 163 Vulpius, Ricarda 52

Wakabayashi, Judy 6 Walicki, Andrzej 60 Wall, Barbara 218 Watts, Richard 2 Webster, John 125 – 6 Whitman, Walt 314 – 16, 318 Wierzbicka, Anna 38, 42 Wilde, Oscar 9, 37, 44 – 5, 134, 199 Wilson, Karin 19 Wirtschafter, Elise Kimerling 53 Witkowski, Michał 311, 318 Witt, Susanna 11, 174 – 5, 185 – 6, 217, 221, 223 – 6, 230 – 1, 253, 260, 288 Wolf, Michaela 2 World Literature (publishing house) 10, 141, 222, 259 Wright, Richard 145, 150, 152 – 5 Yaguello, Marina 39 Zakhoder, Boris 209, 211, 215 – 16, 218 Zalizniak, Andrei A. 28, 40 – 1 Zazubrin, Vladimir 191 Zenkevich, Mikhail 295 Zhirmunskii, Viktor 127 Zhivov, Viktor 54 Zhukovskii, Vasilii 8 – 9, 95 – 7, 100 – 101, 105 – 7, 182, 225 Zirin, Mary 92 Zlateva, Palma 33 Zogbo, Lynell 19 Zotov, Vladimir 119 Zubok, Vladislav 244 Zukkau-Nevskii, Vladimir 295 Zverev, Aleksei 107, 298, 301 Zwischenberger, Cornelia 6